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“... 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 ...”

“... he deriv’d from Heav’n alone’, that all his ‘parts [were] so equal perfect’, and that ‘Peace was the Prize of all his toils and care,’ Dryden predicted that ‘His Ashes in a peaceful Urne [would] rest.’ It was not to be. Less than two years later, Dryden was addressing similar panegyrics to Charles II – Dryden attributed his switch to his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... shall stand/With its unshaken head, till time’s last sand.’ This last phrase was borrowed by David Kynaston for the title of his captivating history of the bank.* The exit of the deputy governor remained unequalled for drama until the resignation of another deputy governor during the Barings crash three centuries later, after a Sunday tabloid reported ...”

“... the same root as ‘rune’ or ‘secret’. The drama of the proceedings zings off the pages of David Carpenter’s magisterial new study. What Carpenter does better than his rivals or predecessors is to make clear the continuing intensity of events after Runnymede and the hectic pace of them. Within days of its sealing, engrossments of the Charter were ...”

“... United Kingdom, Madagascar) and archipelagic states (Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines). David Bosco opens his account of ocean governance with the question of the Senkaku Islands, eight uninhabited rocks between Taiwan and Okinawa which are in themselves no good to anyone but are nonetheless bitterly contested. Under US occupation from 1945, when ...”

“... Among them was the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had travelled to Sri Lanka with David Miliband to argue, in vain, for a truce. Rajapaksa’s remark was in one sense a tribute to how Kouchner has changed the world. It is Kouchner, more than anyone, who has eroded the distinction between philanthropy and combat. As a young gastroenterologist ...”

“... not quite know what to do with them. The illustration on the front cover is by a Scottish artist, David Wilkie. John Rennie makes an appearance as one of ‘the most iconic figures of the age’. Thomas Chalmers features as the ‘spiritual guide’ of the Liberal Tories. Adam Smith, of course, is ‘central’. Mechanics institutes open first in Glasgow, and ...”

“... by or about the group. Clive Bell went to the Paris exhibitions, there were stories by David Garnett, features on Duncan Grant, and Woolf wrote five pieces, including one about Sir Walter Raleigh. Vogue still owed something to the society magazine that was the earliest incarnation of the American edition, and the first frontispiece went to Eileen ...”

“... embarrassed, because they remained pro-Soviet till they died. When Jeremy Corbyn met them at a peace conference in Denmark in the early 1990s he asked what they thought of me. My father said, ‘We’re proud of him,’ which pleased me greatly. He had never said anything like that to me … In 1968, you started the ‘Black Dwarf’ – a newspaper that ...”