“... When, in War and Peace, young Nikolai Rostov first rides, into action with his fellow hussars against the French at Austerlitz, he feels that the longed-for time has come ‘to experience the intoxication of a charge’, about which he has heard so much. At first he is indeed elated, but then the unseen enemy suddenly becomes visible, Rostov’s horse is shot under him, there is ‘around him nothing but the still earth and the stubble ...”

“... and chaos can be avoided. In Broken April, however, the Kanun is no longer a way of maintaining peace, but has become an all-consuming end in itself – as well as a way for the Prince of Orosh to raise money, requiring his peasants to kill one another and then pay him for the privilege. Gjorg is not the only character in the novel making his slow way ...”

“... Next: How to Get the Best from Brexit. Striding into the sunlight, we encounter Adam Smith and David Ricardo and the slightly more contemporary figure of Theresa May, whose ambition to make Britain ‘the global leader in free trade’ Hannan quotes approvingly. Free trade is the great elixir. ‘Free trade doesn’t simply put more money into the hands of ...”

“... with Iran, when his Minister of Health seemed to favour his stepping down from office to enable peace to be made with Khomeini. A shot from Saddam’s pistol settled the problem of the Minister of Health. By contrast, at one point during the Suez invasion in 1956 Major Salah Salem thought that Gamal Abdul Nasser should give himself up personally to the ...”

“... Israeli expansionism comes from the Diaries of the late Moshe Sharret, Foreign Minister under David Ben-Gurion and Prime Minister in 1954 and 1955. The Diaries, eight volumes covering the years 1953 to 1957, detail a number of incidents, including the slaughter of 60 Jordanian villagers by Ariel Sharon’s notorious Unit 101, and the Gaza raid of 1955, in ...”

“... she says as much – memory does not always play host to the right kinds of attention. ‘To make peace is to forget,’ she concedes. ‘To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.’ When one’s own terror and injury have been memorised as folktale, it becomes all the more easy to mete out injustice to others, as the Serbs did to ...”

“... When the South Vietnamese leader, Nguyen Van Thieu, tried in 1972 to block Kissinger’s latest peace initiative with the North, he raged in the Oval Office: ‘Thieu is an unmitigated, selfish, psychopathic son of a bitch. He has to be insane.’ (This, remember, is the man whose regime Kissinger wanted to prop up for the sake of American honour.) After ...”

“... do at the ceremony, in deference to his orthodox kinsmen. This was in 1978, shortly after the Camp David Accords with the Egyptian Government of Sadat. Shepherd was one of those alarmed by Israel’s new right-wing government, headed by Menachem Begin: religious parties allied themselves with the right-wingers, rejecting Labour and the old ...”

“... told the assembled bankers at the Mansion House, ‘a situation were to be forced upon us in which peace could only be preserved by ... allowing Britain to be treated where her interests were vitally affected as if she were of no account ... I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a ...”

“... simply of having survived – were left to bear the burden of a disappointing and mediocre peace. Brittain became a leading spokeswoman for this national myth. What substance did it have? Economically, not much: the Twenties slump was caused by government policy rather than loss of manpower, though this did not become obvious until the boom years that ...”

“... national and international purposes, and the requirements of defence with the cause of world peace. When he took over the leadership of the Labour Party in 1935, its mood was pacifist. But Attlee, the old soldier of Gallipoli, was careful to stress the military implications of collective security. Churchill, it is interesting to discover, picked up ...”

“... Lang believed that the musicologist should not shy away from his role as disturber of the peace in the serene and pleasurable world of music, where awkward questions about performing practice, sociology, theory and aesthetics are still too often regarded as an infringement of the right simply to ‘enjoy’ music. This view seems to have been taken to ...”

“... case was promoted by the governor of the principality: Lord Keith, a Jacobite exile and friend of David Hume and James Boswell. Rousseau could hardly have been more fortunate in his protector. For Keith was no longer a fiery Catholic enthusiast for lost causes but a good-natured sceptic, who enjoyed Rousseau’s company, and was not unduly put out by his ...”

“... so intellectual supporters of the Iraq War – among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment – have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving ...”

“... There is a good answer in the argument James conducted with W.K. Clifford, brilliantly explored by David Hollinger in an essay in The Cambridge Companion to William James. Clifford had said that it is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence, a claim James thought ‘thoroughly fantastic’ because it excluded most human action most of the ...”