“... 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 ...”

“... he can at least be said posthumously to have vindicated his argument of a Church hardly living at peace with itself, still less being ‘godly and quietly governed’. Why, though, did Dr Bennett’s initial intervention – a literary exercise written according to an essentially old-fashioned formula – cause such offence? In one sense, he was certainly the ...”

“... Egyptian nationalists, but he certainly did not want to withdraw from the whole region. ‘In peace and war,’ he said in a Cabinet memorandum of 1949, ‘the Middle East is an area of cardinal importance to the United Kingdom, second only to the United Kingdom itself.’ But in that case there would have to be a British military presence in the region ...”

“... game in New York; or it might recall Lessing’s play, Nathan the Wise, about the good Jew making peace between Muslim and Christian in the Holy Land. But really Michael Wharton, in his ‘Peter Simple’ role, is more like the original prophet Nathan, telling an interesting little fable which abruptly concludes with a fierce, authoritative denunciation of ...”

“... service. For a moment the conflict became real, past the coarse official confrontations. Yet when David Frost repeated one of his characteristic programme models, with a British studio audience and several Argentines present by satellite, no communication of any value occurred. There was jeering from some in the British audience, before arguments were fully ...”

“... 17th century the same international concerns produced the Evangelical Union, the eirenicism of David Pareus, and the disastrous attempt, which provoked the Thirty Years War, to annex Bohemia for the reformed cause. In the next generation they produced the globe-trotting ecumenical initiatives of Dury and Comenius. Those themes, rich and richly ...”

“... else. Perhaps it was good that for once Monty should be the victim of ingratitude. ‘Soldiers in peace are like chimneys in summer,’ runs the saying, but Monty was more like a chimney on fire. In the post-war confusion his ego expanded terrifyingly. Through disregard of his advice, the pull-out from Empire resulted in bloody noses and dogs’ breakfasts ...”

“... Ingrams describes Simon Jenkins, then editor of the Evening Standard, bringing Goldsmith’s final peace terms to him in a coffee bar, when it looked as if Goldsmith might buy the ailing Standard. At that point, Ingrams, too, was ready to settle: The strain of an apparently unending stream of cases was beginning to tell. I myself could talk or think of little ...”

“... citizenship, drew a line at a certain level of ill-treatment. When the wearing of the Star of David was made compulsory in 1941 the US embassy reported ‘almost universal disapproval by the people of Berlin and in some cases ... astonishing manifestations of sympathy with the Jews in public’. Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose genocidal outbursts have been ...”

“... gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or futuristic struck them as fairly ...”

“... birthday: ‘A ranking of New York writers came out on the internet. You were ranked thirty, and David Remnick was eight positions ahead of you. Philip Gourevitch was ranked number eleven. They are both ahead of you.’ Nina, pulling her son aside during the same dinner: ‘It seems like you don’t really know me.’ Semyon, again to Shteyngart’s ...”

“... his own ‘single human man’. ‘It was an evolutionary necessity – a way of getting a bit of peace and quiet . . . You had to go in to keep the outside out.’ In other words, just as the Venice story runs, more or less, off a string of Venice clichés – hot sex, views from bridges, the single drink, with nibbles, at the Gritti Palace – so in ...”

“... a traditionalist who wore a suit and was a church elder, a no-nonsense man who would guarantee ‘peace and calm, law and order’ by means of the ‘Four Cornerstones’ – ‘Unity, Loyalty, Obedience and Discipline’. The regime rested less on overt violence (though there was this, too) than on fear. Many Malawian intellectuals fled into ...”