“... it so little concerneth the commonwealth; nor do I know of any law that authorises a Justice of Peace or other subject to restrain the liberty of a sick person so far as were needful for a discovery of this nature. I cannot therefore deliver any judgment in the case.’ Hobbes, who had burnt many of his own papers for fear they would be used to convict him ...”

“... believes that the answer is relatively straightforward. ‘I follow Kant’s lead in Perpetual Peace,’ he writes, ‘in thinking that a world government – by which I mean a unified political regime with the legal powers normally exercised by central government – would either be a global despotism or else would rule over a fragile empire torn by ...”

“... the Islamic Republic. Nuclear power first came to Iran in the 1950s under the US Atoms for Peace initiative, the basis for the international non-proliferation regime that exists today. It was regulated by an international agency (what became the IAEA) and eventually enshrined in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The NPT held that ...”

“... But there is little doubt that the ending was Rooseveltian. Rhetoric about ‘a people’s peace’ was a staple of the British Communist Party’s pacifist propaganda in 1939-40, and was then appropriated by the mainstream British Left in the crisis of total war. If this was a ‘people’s war’, demanding the energies and even the lives of the ...”

“... seem quite the moment to settle in Israel, even if I could get in. As I write, there is a peculiar peace in the Lebanon, but nobody, least of all the Israelis, supposes that in itself this cooling-off is the prelude to a general settlement. Among the citizens of Jerusalem I came to know there seemed to be none, even among the least militant, who gave one to ...”

“... before the Reformation, The Stripping of the Altars, they have now made things even with David Daniell’s William Tyndale. Tyndale’s life is soon told. He was born, probably in 1494, of a landowning and entrepreneurial family in that part of Gloucestershire where the Cotswolds meet the Severn, since then the home of Evelyn Waugh (temporarily: the ...”

“... Islamists kidnapped by the CIA as part of the extraordinary rendition programme, maintaining the peace with Israel, tightening the siege of Gaza, opposing the ‘resistance’ front led by Iran – American military aid would continue to flow, at a rate of $1.3 billion a year. A façade of euphemism had to be erected to disguise the nature of Mubarak’s ...”

“... would be the world’s policemen; they would fulfil the UN’s central purpose of maintaining peace and security. Troops would be at their disposal since, without the ability to enforce it, there was no point to international law. The alternative was anarchy. After the Cold War there was talk of a UN renaissance, and of a united Security Council ensuring ...”

“... The Foreign Office man tells me that it is all Hizballah’s fault because they are against ‘the peace process’. I murmur that the attacks on civilians were unquestionably started by the Israelis and ask what the Government feels about the creation of yet more hundreds of thousands of refugees. The FO chap thinks that none of that is really relevant ...”

“... and that he prefers dealing with ‘substance’. ‘There are two prerequisites for peace,’ he said. ‘First, the Palestinians must recognise the Jewish state … Second, in any peace agreement, Israel must retain the overriding security control over the entire area west of the Jordan River.’ Unlike ...”

“... of the 20th century: Palestinian nationalism one of the least successful. At the Middle East Peace Conference held in Madrid in late October, the Palestinians, for the first time in the entire history of the conflict, began to gain the upper hand in the propaganda battle. It was a historic reversal which cannot fail to affect the course of the ...”

“... between militant ideologies or what passed for such. Yet in 1976, all this notwithstanding, peace certainly seemed possible. The Zaire-promoted FNLA had been thoroughly beaten, a scatter of subversive British mercenaries were dead or in Angolan jails, while South Africa’s military incursions were at least held in check. Various irregulares had hidden ...”

“... At an enormous ‘peace’ rally in Durban at the end of February Nelson Mandela called upon the warring Inkatha and UDF factions to ‘throw your arms into the sea’, an appeal which met with considerable applause. Perhaps the loudest ovation of all, however, came when Mandela announced, at the meeting’s end, that he had ‘a wonderful present’ to offer the crowd – ‘the mother of the nation ...”

“... IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October War. Washington was deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war, as well as in the lengthy ‘step-by-step’ process that ...”

“... However, the fruits of his political time were mixed: exhilaration at a war won and despair at a peace lost. It is appropriate that the first letter included in this volume should complain about Robert Buchanan, who had found in Kipling’s work ‘all that is most deplorable, all that is most retrograde and savage, in the restless and uninstructed ...”