“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Expectations that the UN, created with great fanfare in 1945, would pave the way for world peace were already falling victim to East-West divisions. The US monopoly in nuclear weapons, the ultimate guarantor of American security, had ended after just four years, when the Soviet Union successfully tested a weapon in August 1949. A month or so later ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”