“... your husband between you have ruined my literary work.’ After that I went to bed. Flooded with peace, I fell asleep. A related Spark speciality – introducing a character as a pretext for a sequence of deadly pounces – is frequently deployed in an unsisterly manner. Take The Girls of Slender Means (1963): Dorothy’s hips were 36 and a half ...”

“... In truth, attitudes varied as widely as do perceptions of all manner of human experience, in peace or in war. Uncle Aubrey was one of a large Catholic family, whose menfolk were all educated by Jesuits at Stonyhurst. When the war came he was 28, newly married and working in the City of London. He enlisted immediately, was commissioned into the East ...”

“... Europe and the Americas seemed to be there. We collected endless saintly smiles, hugs and V-peace signs, while up on the jerrybuilt stage Mick and Keith set loose clouds of yellow butterflies. By dusk, we had gathered six petition signatures, $30 in US currency and £12 sterling and some coins. The Hyde Park fiasco broke Harry’s spirit; it didn’t do ...”

“... in America; to rebuilding Southern Sudan, beginning with Marial Bai; to organisations working for peace and humanitarian relief in Darfur; and to the college education of Valentino Achak Deng.’ But Eggers is repeatedly referred to as ‘the author’, and his is the only name on the cover or the copyright page (the subtitle, ‘The Autobiography of ...”

“... a one-tome definition of what the American novel (for good or ill) so often seeks to be nowadays. David Foster Wallace and Kurt Anderson step aside: today’s big novel is the type of book which aims at bigness with the notion that all other big books are folded inside. The example is not War and Peace but the World Wide ...”

“... has warned the PYD that the Kurds’ future status in Syria should be established by post-conflict peace negotiations between Damascus and the opposition and can’t be unilaterally imposed; in the new Syria that emerges, whatever it looks like, the PYD doubts that Kurdish identity and rights will be respected. In Iraq, the Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani seized ...”

“... ambivalent about children before she had them and their arrival did nothing to change her mind. David Nettleship John was ‘a comic little fellow’, she reported, ‘but he grumbles such a fearful lot. I think he would very much rather not have been created.’ As one pregnancy followed another she gave up painting and, since their income did not ...”

“... Economic Origins of Our Time, published in 1944. The book sought to explain why a long period of peace and stability in Europe ended suddenly and violently with the First World War and the Great Depression. There are in fact two ‘great transformations’ in the book. Like Thompson after him, Polanyi saw the first major change as having taken place in the ...”

“... at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as the chairman’s secretary, if not all the way to Lenin himself. Wary Bolshevik officials summoned the newly appointed British ...”

“... back is as dry as the Mojave, ready. Cranston’s comedy is to be a half-step ahead of the beat, David Duchovny’s to be a half-step behind. In a moving car this balances, like when you perfectly pace a moving walkway so it appears to be standing still. In their silences they are talking about ambition, acknowledging strengths and weaknesses, they are ...”

“... in the waning days of the Humphrey-Nixon election contest, and told them to sabotage the Paris peace talks and thus the main Humphrey peace plank. Do this, Saigon was told, and the incoming Republican Administration will smile on your cause. President Thieu, thus advised by Henry Kissinger and others, pulled out of the ...”

“... pedants, the sick-heads who want to turn off the heavenly choirs for just a bit of morbid peace and quiet.I scoff at Lanza, but I see myself reflected in his crazy encomia, gesticulating, as it were, on the other side of the mirror. Angry exchanges swim up from the past. I am in some crass restaurant in Holland Park which has been dolled up to look ...”

“... of American anthropologists, from a social scientist eager to put her stamp on the postwar peace to one better adapted for the Cold War. Stubborn, tireless and often oblivious to the political weather, Mead was the force behind American anthropology for half a century. The author of 34 books, and countless articles and pamphlets, she holds the civilian ...”

“... enemies in blood, while clerics and footling liberals either egg them on or mutter futilely about peace. The golem-world is not a passing phase but a ‘new ontology’, demanding some equivalently total, all-encompassing answer. Le Monde diplomatique’s current atlas of conflicts lists about 65 wars or agitations; but Hardt and Negri discern ‘almost two ...”

“... Molineux) long since lost in the mists. The issue also contains a consideration of the sociologist David Riesman, since no intellectual journal back then was complete without a Riesman snorkel dive; a piece by Paul de Man (remember him?) which begins on the stirring note, ‘Ever since the war, American criticism has remained relatively stagnant’; and an ...”