“... 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 ...”

“... Kowol says that ‘the maritime approach to fighting a war of endurance ending in a negotiated peace was acceptable to more Conservatives for longer than has hitherto been recognised,’ this also seems irrelevant. After the heroic triad of Dunkirk, Battle of Britain and Blitz, and as Churchill’s rhetoric as prime minister makes clear – his first ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Mosul, Picot was unaware that Kitchener and Sykes were secretly planning to give it to him,’ David Fromkin wrote in A Peace to End All Peace (1989). ‘They wanted the French sphere of influence to be extended from the Mediterranean coast on the west all the way to the east so that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... aberration, England’s sole experience of open military rule since the Conquest. Their powers, David Hume ruled, were exercised ‘not in the legal manner of European nations, but according to the maxims of eastern tyranny’. Nineteenth-century Whiggish historians queued to condemn that ‘despotism’. That the sword reigned in Cromwellian England is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had manifested.Behind me sat Jeannie, a Eucharistic mystic, and her Cajun ex-seminarian husband, David. (At the reception afterwards, in his lovely honk: ‘Best decision I ever made, to leave!’) The women’s heads were covered. Time had not passed. My younger sister, Mary, walked down the aisle in a sort of black sausage casing, as the wedding ...”

“... just before the birth of the state described in Norman Rose’s ‘A Senseless, Squalid War’ and David Cesarani’s Major Farran’s Hat. Both books deal with the last years of the Mandate, when the rightist nationalists of the Irgun and the Stern Gang waged a fierce campaign against British forces and the Arab population, provoking an increasingly harsh and ...”

“... exceptionalism may seem self-satisfied and insular now, but it rested on an assumption that social peace was hard won and that human sinfulness, as Gladstone put it, was ‘the great fact in the world’.Parliament’s function was not just to block rash policies; it also had a responsibility for ‘educating the nation’, in Bagehot’s phrase, persuading ...”

“... already see that the lines had been drawn, or that his attitude towards disturbers of the ordered peace of the Church as well as of the realm progressively hardened after that time: in the epitaph that he composed for himself in 1532, after his resignation of the Chancellorship, he declared that he had always been ‘grievous’ to thieves, murderers and ...”

“... of Ragnar Lothbrok’, in the other camp ‘lay a youth who carried in his bosom the Psalms of David’. And he it was who charged up the hill next morning ‘like a wild boar’, in the words of Asser’s De Rebus Gestis Alfredi, to destroy the Viking jarls. Edward Freeman said flatly that Alfred was ‘the most perfect character in history’, more ...”