“... 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 ...”

“... years. Very good entries on Law (Ross Cranston), Culture (Richard White) and on K.R. Murdoch (David Bowman) are exceptions to the general level. Even granting their own terms – those of closed and authoritative, rather than open and provisional history – the Dictionary and chronology could be much more imaginative; on a reprinting, they should be ...”

“... On 21 November last year it announced that ‘the city has just experienced an unusual outbreak of peace … the longest for three years. Newspaper statistics show that from 29 December 2008, fifty hours passed without a killing. From 29 October 2009, Juárez recorded 41 hours without any violent deaths.’ Luis, a local journalist who meets me at El Paso ...”

“... diplomats have all called on Thein Sein. Each has returned cautious, but unmistakably impressed. David Cameron, who this week became the most important visitor so far, urged us all to ‘pay tribute … to the leadership of President Thein Sein and his government, which has been prepared to release political prisoners, hold by-elections and legalise ...”

“... is that the great and good of Breslau in the 19th and early 20th centuries more or less made their peace with an undemocratic regime dominated by the Prussian military class and with an administrative cadre more divorced from society than their counterparts in Manchester would have tolerated.) Rudolf Stern fought in the Great War and, as late as October ...”

“... following prospectus:A society lives in a state of pure harmony, in which all its members live in peace, love one another, are free from physical danger, from want of any kind, from insecurity, from degrading work, from envy, from frustration, experience no injustice or violence, live in perpetual, even light, in a temperate climate, in the midst of ...”

“... matrix through which East and South see themselves. A strong but representative book like David Dabyeen’s Coolie Odyssey* will go back to The Tempest, Blake and, most evidently, Homer in an effort to come to terms with colonialism. And Derek Walcott has for some years now read ‘Iliads and Odysseys’ (Chatwin’s phrase), Clampitt’s ‘middle of ...”

“... of fifty or more people, when the authorities could already take steps to prevent breaches of the peace? Or introduce a special law to prevent Thistlewood and his friends from doing their absurd drilling on Primrose Hill? The conventional view used to be that of Elie Halévy, that the Acts represented a panic-stricken doubling down on ...”

“... for example, or Maureen Forrester – and then follow this by listening to a countertenor, David Daniels, for example, or Andreas Scholl, or Iestyn Davies (or go on YouTube and listen to a recording of the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, who died in 1922, singing the Bach-Gounod ‘Ave Maria’, with what Feldman called a vibrato that is ‘often ...”

“... responsible for Julian’s fondness for country squirely pursuits. There’s a good description by David Garnett of Julian beagling at Cambridge: he was ‘far bigger, noisier and more raggedly dressed than any of his companions … bursting with happy excitement … Late in the afternoon Julian turned up with his ragged clothes torn to tatters, which flapped ...”

“... now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like cases. David Hume liked this story, and in 1741 retold it in his marvellous essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, where he wrestled with the question of whether such delicacy of judgment was really possible. Some people doubted any such thing, but he did not. Writing in ...”

“... no roots in the labour movement (which doubtless commended him to Blair) and is, if anything, a David Owenite social moderniser. His own schooling is an important part of his political personality. He went to Kingham Hill School, a boarding school for disadvantaged children, and often speaks of his debt to it: ‘I owe more than I can possibly say, or ever ...”

“... past Qatar preferred soft power prestige investments to buying weapons from the West. (In 2015, David Cameron went to Doha at BAE’s behest to sell British warplanes, and returned empty-handed.) But it discovered to its cost that Western powers would be half-hearted in its defence unless it used some of its $340 billion sovereign wealth fund to buy Western ...”