“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... history – a moment reached on 20 July 2019, when he recorded 4876 days (exceeding the record of David Ben-Gurion). Netanyahu began the interview by boasting about the extent of American popular support for Israel. Citizens accosted him on trips across the US, hardly any of whom, he insisted with pleasure, were Jews. The subtext was that anyone in their ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”