“... win the Vogel Award, the most prominent prize for first novels in Australia; it was described by David Marr, Patrick White’s biographer, as ‘astonishingly talented’, and by Jill Kitson of the ABC as ‘a searingly truthful account of terrible wartime deeds that is also an imaginative work of extraordinary redemptive power’. Assuming, as we all ...”

“... Golitzins and Kuragins, names familiar both from Russian history and from the pages of War and Peace. This is no doubt a significant provenance, from which (as she puts it) ‘genes’ could have helped her to become both a poet and a member of a highly-educated élite (her subject is physics), but it certainly makes no difference to the nature of her ...”

“... mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan ...”

“... launched a fleet of biographies, editions and collections of his letters over the last century. David Brown’s fine Life is the latest to grapple with Adams’s paradoxes and limitations: his inconsistent ego, his contradictions, his Waspy waspishness. It deals with his reserve and self-consciousness, his reluctance to risk failure, his unconvincing ...”

“... wrote. Stravinsky of course remained immune – but that’s another story. The first volume of David Nice’s Prokofiev biography stops when the 44-year-old composer settles in Moscow with his Spanish wife, Lina, and two young sons at the end of 1935. But it describes in detail the eight preceding years, during which Prokofiev lived and worked as a ...”

“... Constable grew increasingly preoccupied with printmaking and collaborated with the young engraver David Lucas to translate his oil sketches and paintings into 22 mezzotints, part of what would become known as English Landscape Scenery. Proofs survive, and are covered with the handwritten revisions and instructions with which Constable besieged Lucas: ‘two ...”

“... In Island of Shame (2009), a history of the military bases on Diego Garcia, the anthropologist David Vine reports that in 1960 a Pentagon policy paper advancing dominion was titled ‘South Atlantic and Indian Ocean Monroe Doctrine and Force’. From guano to copra to guns. Britain’s former colonies in Asia were none too happy as news about these ...”

“... Whitney. The audience went completely wild and burst into tears. ‘Let’s pray for peace,’ Dead Whitney said, and everybody bowed their heads before throwing out their arms when the hologram went into a rousing rendition of ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’.‘I wanna feel the heat with somebody,’ I murmured.‘You sing up, son!’ my ...”

“... reconciled. When Bond died in 2015, Lewis was not invited to the funeral.Raymond Arsenault​ and David Greenberg have written scholarly, capacious biographies of Lewis, both of which make significant contributions to the historiography of the civil rights movement and its legacies. Both synthesise the sizeable secondary literature and include recollections ...”

“... first laid down by Hobbes. For Hobbes, states need to be Janus-faced so that they can preserve the peace: preserve it from external aggression and internal interference. But Hobbes also thought that this would only be possible with an unequivocal sovereign who had the power to decide when to fight and when to let things be. Separation of powers was anathema to ...”

“... stage – I was about nine, he nearly 12 – my poor gentle father actually persuaded us to sign a peace treaty in the hope of halting our feud. I can still picture this doomed pact in its red frame, briefly hanging on the wall. To my shame, I was the one who repudiated it, ripped it from its frame and angrily erased my signature, before recommencing ...”

“... of light. But now the spikes are hawthorn, and the hedges Are foamed like ocean’s crests, and peace waits here Deeper than middle South Sea, or the Fortunate Or Fabled Islands. And blue wood-smoke rising Foretells smooth weather and the airs of peace. Even the woodchopper swinging bright His lithe and noble weapon in ...”

“... He wrote The Seven Journeys at this time (it wasn’t published until 1944) and made friends with David Archer, the publisher and bookseller whose Scott Street Arts Centre in Glasgow was a venue for the avant-garde of the interwar years. Graham met Dylan Thomas there, who was sufficiently impressed to include a Graham poem at the end of one of his own ...”

“... park lit with a curious violet effect. An interviewer in Diary of a Young Soul Rebel thinks of David Lynch and Hitchcock in relation to this scene, and certainly those names evoke the right sort of frozen ceriness. But there is excitement in the shot, too – a sense of sexual adventure. The mood is lyrical rather than frightening, and it is into this mood ...”

“... for the crimes committed in the course of it, to claim unique authority as lovers and preachers of peace. To explain this difference Ian Buruma cites, with some qualification, Ruth Benedict’s useful distinction between a ‘guilt’ culture and a ‘shame’ culture. In the former, offences against social norms have to be expiated by confession and ...”