“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have been lost if the war went on; the horror of the destruction would guarantee perpetual world peace. The bomb, he said, was ‘one of the most life-saving decisions in the history of mankind’. Alvarez was far from alone in thinking that, but on his return to Los Alamos, he was irritated by the handwringing of colleagues: ‘Many of my friends felt ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”