“... been the right man to run the war, but had no serious qualifications as an architect of domestic peace. But as Paul Addison rightly suggests in Churchill on the Home Front, Churchill has been ‘generally overestimated as a military leader and underestimated in civilian affairs’. It is true that Churchill was fascinated by military matters: as ...”

“... a sense of deep pointlessness’. Because the body in pain can be neither fully rational nor at peace, it simultaneously undermines the Cartesian divide between mind and body and the Hobbesian opposition between war and peace, and so threatens the very idea of a rationally chosen, scientifically governed society. Nervous ...”

“... turned critical of the Soviet Union, bitterly disappointing their hosts, were excoriated.Michael David-Fox’s Showcasing the Great Experiment is the story of Soviet wooing of the Western intelligentsia, focusing on VOKS under Kameneva and Arosev. About a hundred thousand foreigners visited the Soviet Union in the prewar period, many of them left-leaning ...”

“... her money, he wants to be free, he wants to go on playing the independent English gentleman in peace. So he has hired someone, an amateur actress, to act as Madeleine. She is Judy Barton, a rather coarse, illusionless escapee from Salina, Kansas, a redhead going ginger who is at a loose enough end to take the role of Madeleine, the wife who has a yen for ...”

“... for dead. The last full-scale history of English literature that anybody has bothered over was David Daiches’s two-volume Critical History of English Literature. When it appeared, in 1960, it was thought gallant but defeated. For a successful history of English from a single pen, we must no doubt go back to Saintsbury, who is still readable. There is ...”

“... portray the Zionist pioneers waging a war of independence against the British oppressor. Jon and David Kimche provided a good example of the conventional Israeli analysis of British policy in Both Sides of the Hill: Britain and the Palestine War (1960). ‘It was a mixture of ignorance, blundering, indecision and local bias against the Jews, encouraged by ...”

“... again. George Fenton, who is co-ordinating the music, also chips in, but he’s a musician. David Hunter, the director, chips in too, but he isn’t a musician, just knows what atmosphere he wants at various points in the film. In the finish, even I chip in just because I know what I like. And the musicians just nod and listen, try out a few bars here ...”

“... David McKitterick’s Printing and the Book Trade in Cambridge, 1534-1698 is the first of three projected volumes on the history of the book’s own publisher, the Cambridge University Press. Though the book stretches to 387 pages of text and almost another hundred pages of notes, it does not reach the point around 1700 when Richard Bentley reshaped the Press into a major player, as he tried to reshape Horace, Paradise Lost and Trinity College, where McKitterick is fellow and librarian ...”

“... David Daniell is also the author of the only full-length critical study of Buchan’s work – The Interpreter’s House (1975). Both there and here, in the introduction to this collection of 12 of Buchan’s stories, he is concerned to defend the writer against the usual accusations of anti-semitism, racism and blatant imperialism; to protest against the way he is automatically ranked with Sapper, Dornford Yates and similar figures; and to assert that he is not only worth reading (which the general public has never forgotten), but also worth reading seriously ...”

“... Eastwood is a star whose eyes are totally dead. He kept in his drawer a screenplay for War and Peace. He sold Chaplin the idea for Monsieur Verdoux. He gave many interviews with bits of autobiography, genuine or wishful, thrown in with the criticism of his peers and distinguished predecessors: ‘The goddam pantheon is a perfectly legitimate shooting ...”

“... an optimist. He takes sovereign states, not international conclaves, to be the best guarantee of peace because their statesmen and advisers are rational beings who understand the implications of nuclear warfare. It is only among the non-nuclear minor powers that war may appeal as a rational way of obtaining one’s ends. On the other hand, his prose style is ...”

“... all the many commentators in the West who had something to say about the Hebron events, only one, David Shipler of the New York Times, made a connection between Baruch Goldstein, political Judaism and Zionism itself. All of them, he said correctly, are aspects of each other: they can’t be broken up into smaller, separate units called ‘single deranged ...”

“... Dayton Agreement is probably the only way out of the current mess. But the very novelty of this peace deal means Europe must remain extremely cautious about the possibility of it succeeding. How did our continent allow itself to sink into such a mire of pessimism and confusion? The latest attempt at an answer to this question is offered by Allan Little and ...”

“... mistakes. Which is how I came to spend a rather chilly day on a hill north of Sarajevo watching David, with one hand tied behind his back, tackling Goliath. Having learnt that they cannot rely on the UN to save them, the Bosnian Army were answering back, attacking an advanced Serbian position on the ridge of a hill. They were using an old Russian 70 mm ...”

“... that surrounded his reputation both in his own day and afterwards, as reflected in the 1962 David Lean biopic, presenting him as the romantic hero – tall, blue-eyed, in flowing robes – he always wanted to be. His failures are familiar to anyone who has taken any serious interest in him, and were only too painfully known to himself. He either led or ...”