“... Years as the title of her work in progress. The newspapers, she added, were reporting desperate peace talks at the League of Nations in Geneva. On 3 October, Italian troops entered Abyssinia from Eritrea. Robert wonders whether the news of distant hostilities might rekindle what’s left of Katherine’s desire to do a bit more about things: ‘When the ...”

“... China tries to gain a foothold in the region. According to a recent report by the US Institute of Peace, ‘perhaps to a greater extent than any other geographic area, the Pacific Islands offer China a low-investment, high-reward opportunity to score symbolic, strategic and tactical victories in pursuit of its global agenda.’The US has never tested bombs in ...”

“... directed by bureaucrats and financed by subsidies. It was justifiable in wartime; in the peace that followed, even some farmers opposed it. Ripping up hedgerows and dousing fields in chemicals brought a dividend in the form of high yields and cheap food, but it was only achieved by running down the starting capital – the land itself. The problem ...”

“... have four dozen, which I pack into my towel. A plenary line of Seamus Heaney’s about the singer David Hammond’s thatched cottage at Dooey comes to mind – ‘I say to myself Gweebarra.’ Then I think of these lines from another poem, ‘Oysters’: Alive and violated They lay on their beds of ice: Bivalves: the split bulb And philandering sigh of ...”

“... One​ of the peace walls near the Falls Road in Belfast is decorated with a mural featuring several famous figures – among them, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. At its centre, though, five times the size of the others, is a stern-looking man with bushy, neatly parted grey hair, wearing a frock-coat and necktie ...”

“... Patriarch’s private secretary and the Muslim Mufti of Bethlehem. I recognised a few Israeli peace activists from a demonstration in Jerusalem two days before. There were also many nuns and priests, Palestinian children with different coloured balloons, an Italian delegation led by the formidable MEP Luisa Morgantini (whom Israeli soldiers would beat at ...”

“... so far rightwards that it isn’t really the same party any more. In that process of migration, David Blunkett was one of the key players. Blunkett is important not only because of how he behaved when in office – we’ll get to that in a moment – but also because of the journey he took to get there. A man who from 1980 to 1987 was the leader of the ...”

“... strong,’ Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary just after the end of the war. With the return of peace, the task of the government was again what it had been and what it would continue to be: how to hold it all together; how to create the illusion of national unity out of the fissiparous materials of an unequal society; even, how to prevent revolution. To an ...”

“... the Afghan war was unwinnable. ‘“We’re going to fail on the political,” [Graham] said. A peace settlement with the Taliban was the only way out … Trump had a solution. Did Graham want to be the ambassador to Pakistan? “No I don’t want to be ambassador to Pakistan,” Graham said. They left it at that.’ Meanwhile, the extraordinary turnover of ...”

“... consistently backed US military operations in Afghanistan, which it seemed to view as a Peace Corps programme with soldiers attached. Many involved with human rights are convinced that they are making warfare less nasty, more humane. This is what Koh’s defenders argue: that he was working to restrain and civilise lethal force. But you could also ...”

“... Stevenson reminds us that the magazine wasn’t always either safe or respectable: to disturb the peace was its founding brief. It was started in 1817 by William Blackwood, an Edinburgh bookseller and publisher, as a stick to beat his local rival, Archibald Constable. Blackwood’s new monthly aimed to compete with Constable’s journals – the struggling ...”

“... Scowcroft, James Baker) rather than from the Democrats or the Left? Samantha Power and David Halberstam did not set out to solve this riddle, but they have unintentionally provided an important part of the answer. Power was motivated to study the history of disappointing US responses to genocide by her indignation at the Clinton Administration’s ...”

“... flourishes, and its crowning glories are the five volumes of the Poems edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins and published by Longman between 1995 and 2005. But the pleasures of scholarship are not wholly coextensive with those of reading. Students are probably still encouraged to enjoy the measured venom of the satires. But where to go beyond that? Paul ...”

“... Swilly. Looking at the hail sweeping down the darkening lough, he said, yes, it was good news the peace had been signed, but the deal had been hanging by a thread at four that afternoon. Now, on a hot, sunny, blue day I remember how precarious the talks had been. Reading an article in the Daily Telegraph where David Trimble ...”

“... of the Just War doctrine, not at cities, but at military targets. Three of the books under review, David Owen’s A future that will work and Ken Coates’s The Most Dangerous Decade as well as Objections to Nuclear Defence, cite with approval Lord Mountbatten’s famous Strasbourg speech of 11 May 1979, about which one of the most notable circumstances was ...”