“... only TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’ On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail ...”

“... myself to be part of an older world, where people lived and worked in a state of sentimental peace. All rot of course. But lovely rot. Sometimes I would come downstairs in the night and shine my torch on the painting.At one time it seemed as if all the farms around our way had been abandoned or pulled down to make room for housing. Past railway lines and ...”

“... he raised the knife at one of them. A magistrate bound him over for a year for breach of the peace; he was not referred to hospital. Clunis would have received more help, the Ritchie Report suggests, under a hospital order or through the Probation Services. In the Report’s view, victims should be encouraged to press charges in such situations. Having ...”

“... woman reading a love letter, or writing one, or just admiring herself in the glass), the inner peace of the pictures and the unassertiveness of the sitters, nearly all of them women, are so simple and direct that even two of Rembrandt’s most famous self-portraits, one at either end of his life, seem almost coarse by comparison. I’m sure it’s the ...”

“... of the postwar boom in the OECD zone by Anglo-American economists of the Left – Andrew Glyn, David Gordon and others – and totalised a phase of world history under it. The notion, as always and as he himself concedes, is a retrospective one: treasure discovered after the event. It is amid the rubble of the Landslide that what preceded it appear ...”

“... like the pockets of comic relief in Shakespearean tragedy. It is far larger and more defining. In David Hawkes’s translation of The Dream, an achievement surpassing Scott Moncrieff’s or later English versions of Proust in the art of delivering one cultural world – a much stranger one – into another, not only is the wit no barrier to an Anglophone ...”

“... mistress of General John Pershing and had helped break up the marriage of the British admiral Sir David Beattie. She was introduced to the glamorous young Superintendent. It was, in Perret’s view, a case of mutual and instantaneous lust. Others diagnosed the meshing of public images. The New York Times report of their wedding, on St Valentine’s Day ...”

“... do like reading other women, and seeing them properly recognised for their work.But it’s also, David Runciman reckons on his Talking Politics podcast, to do with the eventfulness of Arendt’s life, which is why Ken Krimstein’s comic-book biography of 2018 is structured around our heroine’s ‘Three Escapes’. Arendt did not arrive in the US until ...”

“... to the ‘public good’ or else to the Jewish people, where these sometimes seem to be the same. David Blumberg, chairman of the board of directors of the National Library, puts the case this way: ‘The library does not intend to give up on cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people … Because it is not a commercial institution and the items kept there ...”

“... families – are unhappy after their own fashion. Tolstoy wrote equally compellingly about war and peace. Literature is best suited for qualitative description, not quantitative accumulation. It isn’t an unhappiness contest, or an unhappiness-entitlement contest. The danger of Cisneros’s dig at her Iowa classmates, ‘cultivated in the finest schools in ...”

“... is not about ripping up the system, much more about fulfilling your personal goals, increasing the peace, opting for harmony. They don’t curse the world, they compliment it with kind acts, and their attitude to a non-recycler is rather like General William Booth’s attitude to drunks. The hardcore waste community does not hate its enemies, but feels sorry ...”

“... time at the school as a ‘year of bitterness and hell that I shall never forget’.Between the ‘peace in our time’ euphoria that Neville Chamberlain brought back from Munich in September 1938 and Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the British public reluctantly came to realise that war with Germany would soon break out, and my father ...”

“... places of refuge. Open prisons I suppose I mean, which keep cropping up in my plays as havens of peace, kitted out with gardens, vegetable plots, craft centres and all unsullied by men. ‘A Lady of Letters’ ends in a women’s prison, with Miss Ruddock saying: ‘I’m so … happy.’ In ‘Nights in the Gardens of Spain’ two characters find love in a ...”

“... and dislocation, amid a flood of refugees in each direction, to both countries. The only path to peace was autonomy for Nagorno-Karabakh within Azerbaijan.1 Of Azerbaijan, writing a decade later, Furman – a frequent visitor to Baku, where he had many Azeri friends – was at pains to dwell on the positive side of the record. Contrary to the expectations of ...”

“... he said. ‘It’s as confusing as hell out there.’ ‘I loved to fly with Dukes,’ said David Peeler, another pilot who served with Spahr in Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 323. ‘John and I had something in common in our childhoods that prepared us very well for that business. It was not a game to him. He understood that to “go to the show”, as ...”