“... is better informed about the fake soldier, ‘Sergeant Farthing’, claiming that his real name is David Jones and that he is a Welshman loosely attached to the London theatre. As for ‘Mr Bartholomew’, the actor says he believes him to be something of a philosopher, with a dissident and free-thinking bias, a certain mathematical or numerological expertise ...”

“... The song​  we hear at the beginning of David Leitch’s film Bullet Train is the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’. It’s a good song and all too relevant, but by the time the movie’s plot gets rolling it sounds more like a fragile wish than any sort of programme. ‘Fate is a name for my bad luck,’ a leading character says ...”

“... Palestine’s gradual depopulation, continuing what the Oslo process began. Yet, like Oslo, Camp David and Taba before it, the Plan is rarely analysed. It is enveloped in silence. Whatever else it claims to be, the Gaza Disengagement Plan is, at heart, an instrument for Israel’s continued annexation of West Bank land and the physical integration of that ...”

“... devilish, the incarnation of cruel despotism. No publicist was more prominent, or bizarre, than David Urquhart, the crackpot Scottish agitator who sat for some years in Parliament. He developed a passion for all things Turkish (including Turkish baths, which he introduced to London), denounced Russia in apocalyptic terms, and maintained that Palmerston was ...”

“... to any such guarantee. But he still felt that there were ways to avoid the worst. ‘A negotiated peace, always,’ he said. ‘Unconditional surrender to let them shoot half a million Spaniards, never!’ His strategy now became just to fight on, without any prospect of victory but in the hope of forcing concessions from Franco as the price of a ...”

“... see that much remains to be done ere the world is brought under the universal rule of love and peace.’ This is rather like the devoted missionary Mr Sorley in A Passage to India, who believed that God’s mercy, being infinite, ‘may well embrace all animals’ but ‘became uneasy during the descent to wasps’. Muir deeply respected Thoreau but he ...”

“... like Crewe, Hardinge, Chelmsford and Montagu were preoccupied with waging war against Germany and peace against Gandhi, and were trying to steer India, with what initiative they could still command, towards dominion status. In this grown-up world of men and affairs, Lutyens was out of his depth, a bird of paradise in a chicken run, an irritating prima donna ...”

“... culture the diminution of passions into moods has been the payback for a generally high level of peace and security, along the lines laid out so forcefully and influentially in Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process? To his credit, Fisher does not end his book with a bang, and the frequent elegance and non-judgmental quality of his observations should lead ...”

“... the voice was Jacob’s voice, i.e. the voice of the Likud. The Zionist Left – Meretz, Labour, Peace Now – should no longer be part of this game, but, alas, nothing will persuade it to distance itself from the military, even when this proximity sends the electorate straight into the arms of the Likud. After all, why should the voters settle for a fake ...”

“... that when he and the Marxist scientist J.D. Bernal were in an exuberant crowd at the World Peace Conference in Rome in 1959, Bernal turned to him and said: ‘Did you hear that, dean? They are shouting: “An honest priest, he should be our Pope.”’ It’s a thought that might well have crossed the dean’s own mind, feeling as strongly as he did ...”

“... Britain has heard of, and even Americans seem to be hazy about it. It ran from 1812 to 1815; the peace that formally settled it was signed on Christmas Eve 1814, but because news took so long to travel not everyone knew this until April the following year. It was during this war that British troops burned down the presidential mansion in Washington – the ...”

“... socialist achievements, especially in terms of women’s emancipation, and to promote the Soviet peace campaigns. The women were told to probe their pen-pals’ voting intentions and nudge them in the right direction (in 1948, that meant towards the Progressive presidential candidate, Henry A. Wallace). In practice, though, the letters proved much more than ...”

“... and none of them would have understood the modern relocation of politics below imagination. David Norbrook’s Poetry and Politics in Renaissance England is a protest against the devaluation of political verse, and especially of radical political verse. Where Dr Johnson could deplore Milton’s radicalism yet admire his poetry, Eliot and Leavis expelled ...”

“... Kennedy learned the mixture of forbearance and resolution which lies at the heart of international peace and good marriages is a mystery; his mother and father were no better at solving problems than Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler. But two new books about the Cuban missile crisis show how, in a pinch, Kennedy managed to keep a serious argument from ...”

“... and felt that ‘Aziz would take charge’. It doubtless was, and he did, but that brought her no peace. She startled Cairo society with peculiar Surrealist parties, sped off into the desert with various amorous companions to explore and photograph exotic sights, and eventually sailed off to other countries to meet other people, while her benevolent husband ...”