“... 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 ...”

“... the good manners and the talents of Madame Coswai’. They visited the studios of Jacques-Louis David and of Le Brun, whom Maria found ‘so obliging’ that, as she later confided to her diary, she was almost able to overlook her ‘weak, poor, cheap, common, badly drawn’ work. For her, the most consequential event of the French trip was her meeting with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Baldwin died’. Philip Roth has been led to histories of American racism by Coates’s books. David Brooks credits him for advancing an ‘education for white people’ that evidently began after ‘Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings’. Even USA Today thinks that ‘to have such a voice, in such a moment, is a ray of light.’ Coates ...”

“... which meant that he was spared military service in the Great War. In 1919, he attended the Peace Conference in Paris with the British delegation, just after Channon had left the city. The US had entered the war in April 1917, although no American troops fought on the front line for nearly a year, and Channon never fought at all. Instead, he went to ...”

“... was that it was an instrument by which neighbours, kin and friends could succeed in living in peace with each other’. Many historians would be happy to accept that links through baptism were of great importance in the past, and that both sworn brotherhood and inter-sex marriage need to be seen in the context of a much broader network of made ...”

“... Jonas Savimbi rejected the result and the country was plunged into another ten years of fighting. Peace came when Savimbi was killed in 2002, since when the postwar poor – and the elites – have found extremes of inequality far easier to live with than foreign invaders, marauding soldiery, ordnance, press-gangs and starvation, all of which they and their ...”

“... might know its heroes. It’s ironic that Liudmila Saraskina’s deeply admiring biography of the David who challenged the Soviet Goliath should now appear under its imprint. As Saraskina tells the story, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian patriot and Orthodox Christian, was a man with a mission from the first. Unswerving, uncompromising, beset by perils and ...”

“... the pope: those who escaped from the Catholic inquisition in Spain [Sephardic Jews] found peace in our just order in Istanbul and İzmir. We are ready to discuss historical issues, but we will not let people insult our nation through history.’ To pause on the effrontery of citing benevolence to 15th-century Jews at a time when his party and its ...”

“... the efforts of kindly Tommies in winning hearts and minds. Recent studies – for instance, David French’s excellent The British Way in Counter-Insurgency 1945-67 – show that in Malaya, Cyprus, Aden and Kenya British soldiers in fact displayed frequent brutality, often condoned by their officers. In all of Britain’s counterinsurgency ...”

“... and Randolph Quirk) jostle with poets and novelists (including Medbh McGuckian and Amy Tan). David Dabydeen writes ‘On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’, and discusses, in impeccably establishment English, a question that might just as well come under ‘Art’: how does a black writer in English find an authentic voice: what does s/he ...”

“... have to hold my breath for fear of infecting the people who come near me.’ A view shared by David Gascoyne (with whom she was briefly in love, she nearly 40, he not yet 20), who wrote: ‘On the whole, I think her influence on the people she comes in contact with is bad ... There are very few who can stand the dazzling (but how depressing!) light of ...”