“... earned him the wrath of Israel’s supporters, who were particularly angry with him for quoting David Ben-Gurion as saying:Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does it matter to ...”

“... David Gibson was a man stiff and parsonical; by all accounts the sort of man who got things done. You could say he was obsessed with ridding Glasgow of its slums, with turning them into something bright and high and unquestionably modern. That’s what he wanted, and he’d already made vast advances towards getting it when he became convener of Glasgow Corporation’s housing committee in 1964 ...”

“... over his life and over his conduct as a leader of the Revolution, and what is soon evident about David Lawday’s spirited and highly readable biography is that he stands Danton in a flattering light and pays insufficient attention to movements in the shadows. ‘The Gentle Giant of Terror’, the subtitle calls him: which suggests, along with revolutionary ...”

“... being the buzzword for the shearing off of voter-unfriendly associations. Before David Cameron, or ‘DC’, as he’s known, took over in December 2005, Conservative strategists had noted anxiously that focus groups would turn against almost anything – even, or especially, tax cuts – as soon as they were told it was Tory ...”

“... of the Taliban, sometimes for their tactical ability but mostly for their bravery. Major Martin David, whose thoughtfulness made him seem a reluctant warrior, said: ‘Even when they’re onto a complete loser, they insist on pushing forward. On the one hand you have to admire that determination. On the other hand you feel sort of sad. It’s just a shame ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... a man with wild red hair (looking like Léonide Massine in The Red Shoes) who brings Livesey and David Niven tea in the country house where some amateurs are rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This house seems to be set on a series of steps which, though the film was shot in the studio, relates it to Hardwick Hall and also to the dream sequences that ...”

“... a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage were masked (and painfully complicated) by the emotional ...”

“... our past’. The Legacy Museum documents the history of slavery, while the National Memorial for Peace and Justice commemorates the black victims of lynching in the American South between 1877 and 1950. For almost two decades the EJI and its executive director, Bryan Stevenson, have been fighting against the racial inequities of the American criminal justice ...”

“... on the prominence of ‘the morbid and the tragic’ in his own work, the Guyanese poet David Dabydeen once said that ‘the plantation experience had severe and traumatic psychic impacts … but overwhelmingly had to do with what is the very ground of our being, which is our body.’ This is an obvious reason slavery goes with revenge tragedy. The ...”

“... mentioned, that people were killed, spanked in fact to death. A couple of days ago one of our peace-keeping troops was shot in Bosnia and he is pictured everywhere. Maybe the Serbs or the Croats, or whoever it was shot him, think this was just a bit of a spanking too.16 January. Now the papers are full of the latest scandal, the bugged phone call between ...”

“... as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor David Lurie’s seduction of his student is bound up with his admiration for Byron’s poetry, Lara in particular.It’s easy to forget, in this context, that Byron was the same poet who could picture possible incest and a poisoning in The Bride of Abydos ...”

“... of the past four hundred years ought to move it to centre stage, as a prime generator of war and peace, stability and chaos, prosperity and dearth. As Clausewitz might have said, shooting wars are trade wars carried on by other means. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, for instance, came after the tsar quit the Continental Blockade. Through the Middle ...”

“... Leone. Winding down in Angola was a setback for EO: it meant the loss of a potential, privatised peace dividend as a supervisor and trainer of the integrated armed forces – remunerative work which now looks destined for a US paramilitary company. The blow was softened not only by the Sierra Leone contract but by EO’s ability to shuffle men and resources ...”

“... soul passed gently from this earth ... The long sleep began. It was so deserved, so full of peace and grace.’ Maybe Coren would feel happier if he could be certain that Wells had been condemned to eternal torment. In Gilbert we are told that Chesterton would now have a much wider readership ‘if his cause had been socialism or the pursuit of a ...”