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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her to meditate on language, in swoony paragraphs. She promises us ‘the word that does not bring peace but a sword’. Later, we are told about ‘the word that is spirit, the word that is breath, the word that hangs the world on its hook’, and later still: ‘the whirling word. The word carried quietly away at my side, the word spun out, vigorous, precise ...”

“... with the censor. In this struggle, writers portrayed themselves with sly disingenuousness as David confronting Goliath. In reality, most writers believed that they, and not the state, would have the last word. And so it has proved. Ben Jonson’s lines are apposite: Nor do they aught, that use this cruelty Of interdiction, and this rage of burning; But ...”

“... death ... Labial gossip of night, sibilant chorals’, urgent beckoning sounds, oddly combining peace and shrillness. Stevens’s line is cited by Donoghue to show that writers in English ‘find the letter s troublesome’ and that Stevens would not have called sibilants ‘heavenly’, or ‘heavily’. But Whitman did, near enough. Stevens thought they ...”

“... in a cantonment on the plain to the east of Kabul, and for two years Afghanistan enjoyed an uneasy peace. In November 1841 rioting broke out in Kabul. Rebellion spread through the country, co-ordinated by Akbar Khan, the Dost’s son, and by Christmas Day the British – far from aid, and worsted by the guerrilla tactics of the Afghans – had agreed ...”