“... quotes the half-drunken Leskov as having said: ‘Thee I anoint with oil, even as Samuel anointed David … You must write.’ Like so much else in Chekhov’s work, his relation to religion is ambiguous. In a letter to Diaghilev a year before his death, he wrote: ‘I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious.’ But while ...”

“... as well as making plain that the hands of Jewish decision-makers have not been held out in peace. From a ‘pro-Palestinian’ point of view, his research seems liable to undermine the unity of the Palestinian national movement if only by showing the historic depth of ‘betrayal’ in the Palestinian community in the 1930s and 1940. In 1920 Chaim ...”

“... to negotiate with anyone but the emperor himself. ‘I understand that you want to negotiate peace, you who call yourself a “deputy”,’ he responded. ‘How shall I respond? You are someone else’s representative, and I am a free and autonomous man answering to none but God.’ Witbooi kept a diary that gives an important African perspective on the ...”

“... deity. Camp is no substitute for wit, and Auden wasn’t especially good at either.Luckily for the peace of their various households, they were both sluts. If Auden had been as big a stickler for tidiness as he was for punctuality he would never have had his pinny off. Chester was an inspired cook, though wasted on Auden, who preferred good nursery food and ...”

“... Lega was already in another far-right grouping). The ECR had been the creature of the Tories since David Cameron turned his back on the mainstream conservative European Peoples Party (EPP), historically the driving force of European integration. But Brexit meant that the Conservatives didn’t contest the 2019 European election. This was another stroke of luck ...”

“... pendant on this necklace. But if he loses, and above all if a democratic Russia emerges to make peace with its neighbours, some of the statelets will explode in blood and there will be an exodus of yet more refugees. They are – from south-east to north-west – Artsakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, the two Donbas ‘republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk, and ...”

“... to moral discourse and retaining a distinctly clerical air. The Labour guru in postwar Oxford was David Worswick, the well-known economist, not David Worick, as he appears both in the text and the index. By no stretch of the imagination can the students of T.H. Green be said to have ‘invented’ the Fabian Society ...”

“... the secrets behind better Bombs. Success in achieving either, as the physicist and historian David Kaiser has argued, depended on resolving a problem about secrecy that was at once philosophical and political. If scientific and technological knowledge was crucial, did it come in discrete units, some of which needed special protection while others were ...”

“... of utopia’. Imagine how much easier politics would be if the only thing standing in the way of peace and harmony was, as she puts it, ‘evil religious fundamentalists with guns’. You wouldn’t need to worry about capitalism or racism, your own complicity in both or either. Whether you are aunt or wife or cook or freemartin, all women are equally ...”

“... true poetry?’Returning to Hardy via these new selections of his work, edited by Ralph Pite and David Bromwich, I was surprised by how much I had forgotten – or misremembered. Whereas Bromwich takes his text from later editions, Pite opts for the first editions of individual volumes and provides a sampling of Hardy’s revisions in the endnotes, partly to ...”

“... didn’t speak a word of German, needed to be occupied and annexed to the Reich.At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, Queen Marie of Romania had ‘shuddered’ to think of the possible repercussions of the ‘ghastly’ peace terms being forced on Germany. ‘I thought of the hideous suffering which would follow, of ...”

“... has been clumsy – so clumsy in the case of basic White House operations that the Republican David Gergen had to be brought in. Even now, Clinton could find better people to work for him; but there is the deeper problem of his own decision-making. Clinton refuses to decide by experience and instinct as most of his predecessors have mostly done. He tries ...”

“... is not very much made up either. Then shouldn’t this be as impressive in its own way as War and Peace or that Anglo-Saxon chronicle so much beloved by Russians, The Forsyte Saga? Alas, no. Art does not work like that, even with a writer as talented, industrious and conscientious as Paul Scott. Art abhors a vacuum, and Scott’s sequence seems to be founded ...”

“... spending ten years in South African prisons for plotting revolution, now works in the School of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford. In his book he has put to extensive use the archives of documents, manifestos, leaflets and underground newsletters relating to the period of the revolt that have been got out of South Africa, and he has tried to make ...”

“... of British Airways. For Ian Ash, British Telecom’s Director of Corporate Relations. For David Quarmby, Chairman of the British Tourist Authority and the English Tourist Board. You get the picture. A kind of mega musical set on a desert island (Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Tempest). Something so new and adventurous and breathtakingly original that it ...”