“... 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 ...”

“... agreed, among them Saleh Muslim, the leader of the PYD, the YPG’s political arm. In Britain David Richards, the former chief of the defence staff, called on Cameron to accept that Assad’s army was best placed to take the fight to IS. ‘At the moment we’ve got contradictory war aims,’ he told the BBC. ‘We want to deal with Isis but we also want ...”

“... politicians meant that Britain engaged in war after unnecessary war, and with each return of peace the boys came home and either failed to find jobs or displaced the stay-at-homes who had them. Suddenly, it became much less safe to walk the London streets or travel on the highways. It was in the aftermath of the War of Austrian Succession that Henry ...”

“... most of it), which should be seen as cautionary rather than exemplary. Andrew is critical of Sir David Petrie, ‘one of the service’s most successful DGs’ (at the time of the Double-Cross System during the war), for claiming that ‘too much of a past that is now remote can help but little with useful lessons,’ but Petrie may have been right in this ...”

“... satisfaction with the prime minister was taken; it recorded strong support for Chamberlain and peace. From then on, MPs could no longer regard themselves as the sole interpreters of public opinion. The polls not the pols would influence the ups and downs of governments, drive policies to be softened or abandoned, compel ministers and even party leaders to ...”

“... but which take effect as modifications of the ancient power of controlling breaches of the peace. The judges now have a new final tier in the form of the Supreme Court, and it’s possible that some of its justices will not baulk at an assertion of local judicial power where rights are concerned, and will claim it is quite independent of the alien law ...”

“... who hadn’t committed rape or murder, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has brokered a precarious peace, if it’s possible to describe as ‘peaceful’ a country in which well over a thousand political murders take place each year. But the perpetrators of Algeria’s war crimes have yet to be identified and punished, and many rebels with blood on their ...”

“... stance to begin with: shortly before assuming the presidency for the first time in 2000, he told David Frost he sought ‘more profound’ integration with Nato, and ‘would not rule out’ Russian membership. In the aftermath of the 11 September attacks – having himself levelled the remains of Grozny in what was billed as a ‘counterterrorist ...”

“... the rains fail. That fact can never be repeated too often.The organisation I work for, the World Peace Foundation, has compiled a catalogue of every case of famine or forced mass starvation since 1870 that killed at least 100,000 people. There are 61 entries on the list, responsible for the deaths of at least 105 million people. About two thirds of the ...”

“... memories of 6 January were at any risk of fading, they were rekindled on 28 October, when David DePape attacked Paul Pelosi, husband of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, with a hammer after breaking into their home in San Francisco (she subsequently announced she was standing down as Speaker). DePape shook Pelosi awake with cries of ‘Where’s ...”

“... his younger brother Hamo at Gallipoli and his beloved ‘poor Tommy’, his fellow Welch Fusilier David Thomas – nourished his Homeric rage, which, in a uniquely Sassoonian way, led him to take the whole burden of war on himself as a kind of cosmic personal insult:I want to smash someone’s skull; I want to have a scrap and get out of the war for a bit or ...”

“... the war was hard enough,’ she grumbled. ‘Now the playwrights are doing their best to ruin the peace for us.’Once she had identified a formula, Parker didn’t devote much space to individual plays. Those she didn’t like could be summed up quickly – ‘The House Beautiful is the play lousy’ – while those she admired, such as Eugene O’Neill’s ...”