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“... of East and West alike. This other Ransome was, I think, first brought to public attention by David Caute in The Fellow Travellers (1973), then by Hugh Brogan in his 1984 biography, more recently in papers declassified by MI5 in 2005, and now by Roland Chambers in this new biography. It should be said at once that the bulk of the evidence was never ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... intensity in such media ‘events’ as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and the David Duke campaign. Conspiracy theories detailed the infiltration of American higher education by ‘politically correct’ militants, and lamented the takeover of the art world by feminists, homosexuals and ethnic minorities. In short, for Americans who watch ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... two other biographies in English already exist: Iain Hamilton’s Koestler: A Biography (1982) and David Cesarani’s Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998). But Scammell has little time for either work. His bibliography dismisses Hamilton’s book as ‘superficial and ill-researched’, and Cesarani’s (the one which attacked Koestler as a serial ...”

“... men who acquired notoriety as public reformers, as active opponents of government, as advocates of peace, friends of France, or supporters of the popular reform societies, were Godwinians. William Frend and Gilbert Wakefield were advanced Unitarians; Daniel Isaac Eaton was a Paineite deist and republican; Irish Catholics and Dissenters rose together in ...”

“... as a skilful broker who could milk the system’s weaknesses to bring relative prosperity and peace to Hungary after it was all over: and in the end this explains the distinction fudged earlier, between an uprising to overthrow the Party’s authority and a revolution to transform it and make the state democratic. Uprising would fulfil its author’s aim ...”

“... twice a year. But Trump, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, his Israel adviser, Jason Greenblatt, and David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel (or Israel’s ambassador to the US – I find I’m confused), have given Israelis a free pass to go on imagining the post-conflict future in terms of the present overwhelming power imbalance between Israel and ...”

“... Cuban girls.’ Charb who preferred to die and Wolin who preferred to live. I blame you, Charb. Peace on your soul. Roussel’s was a lonely voice and in response to complaints, including one from the publisher of Charlie Hebdo, the editor of Nouvel Observateur replied that after serious discussion it had been agreed that freedom of speech was best ...”

“... clever and is pleased with himself, not overweening or arrogant but just happy, proud, at peace. He mimicked Truman Capote describing Jackie Kennedy screwing a big Negro chauffeur while her children whimpered in the back seat – ‘Not a word of it true, mind you; he just can’t help himself; he has to tell lies. Which is why I’m suing him for ...”

“... his son becomes oppressive and unhealthy. When Marcus enrols at a Newark college, the father, his peace and livelihood already threatened by the proximity of a new supermarket, begins to be haunted by fear for the boy’s safety, whether fear of the draft – thousands of American conscripts are dying in Korea – or more generally fear for his son’s ...”

“... from a loose identification with the Workers’ Party to becoming a behind-the-scenes adviser to David Trimble in his brave attempt to bring Unionism to the middle ground of power-sharing with a domesticated Sinn Féin. Bew is allegedly the originator of the pithy identification of Trimble’s desired power base as ‘the Prod in the garden centre’; the ...”