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“... their Northern neighbour, none of the Southern republics has ever enjoyed prolonged periods of peace, prosperity or internal security. Mexico, the largest and wealthiest of them, has come closest. Mexico, says Peter Smith, in his chapter in the Cambridge History, ‘stands out as a paragon of political stability within Latin America’. There have been no ...”

“... explain and go to check the newspapers. The Independent has a well-informed and balanced piece by David McKittrick on the genesis of the ceasefire. He seems cautiously optimistic. Not so that other old ham, Conor Cruise O’Brien, writing on the same newspaper’s opinion pages. O’Brien sees the timing of the ceasefire as evidence of a Machiavellian plot to ...”

“... recent survey of modern Colombian history claimed that ‘Colombia has scarcely known one day of peace since its inception.’ However, as Forrest Hylton argues in Evil Hour in Colombia, the view that violence is inherent to Colombian society ignores both the country’s 19th-century history of democratic reform and the degree to which violence is employed ...”

“... was shunned despite the Administration’s meaningless commitment to ‘go the extra mile for peace’. Saddam Hussein, the long-time recipient of American arms and funds, became at once a monstrous tyrant: ‘worse than Hitler,’ according to Bush. ‘What is at stake,’ he told the American people two weeks after the start of the Allied air ...”

“... of the war, Hattersley says delicately, Lloyd George’s ‘conduct during the negotiation of the peace treaty is difficult to defend’. As a leading government adviser, Keynes was revolted by the insouciant way in which Lloyd George decided that electoral advantage lay in backing Clemenceau’s demands for the dismemberment of Germany and for unpayable ...”

“... used to say. The new version is ‘Zimbabwe is kenge,’ which means roughly the same thing. David Caute’s portrait of white mores is savage, but like so many visitors before and after him, he was fascinated – seduced – by Rhodesia. It was, and is, a country which captivates even as it appals, and it has always been so much easier to explain the ...”

“... Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was published, describing one New Jersey man’s dual existence as a top student at Yale and an incorrigible drug dealer.1 Peace was an alarmingly precocious black boy whose mother toiled in hospital kitchens to raise the ...”

“... C.R.W. Nevinson, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer. Together they are the subject of David Boyd Haycock’s compelling group biography, A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War (2009), and now also of an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (until 22 September). Gertler became obsessed with Carrington. Nash was in ...”

“... safely (if painfully and disastrously) in the mind. No director realises this more clearly than David Cronenberg. He is best known no doubt for The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988) and his much vilified Crash (1996), but some of us have a soft spot, if that’s the term, for his early work The Brood (1979), a classic instance of the acting-out theory. A ...”

“... Spalding plods along, torn between ‘going for it’ as an actor in Hollywood and joining the Peace Corps (he does neither), chronically indecisive, unassertive, impressionable and apolitical (‘I’ve never even voted in my life’). The monologues search his past for clues. They reveal that this sense of nonentity extends even to his physical being. As ...”

“... of dogs. When we retreat to a distance and look again, we are filled more than ever by feelings of peace and ease and grandeur and also by a growing elation that is engendered by a sense of movement going on within the bow-shaped arcs of the great Gothic arch created by the trunks of the trees. It is a play of smaller bow-shaped arcs created by ...”

“... republic with socialists, Jews, the ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend of German defeat and a sell-out peace settlement. It was a small Protestant town with a large educated middle class, conservative artisans, numerous rentiers and a strong radical-right cultural tradition. Small wonder, then, that the Bauhaus faced so much local opposition. Walter Gropius ...”

“... who committed the terrible outrage of 11 September, but then declined to commit troops to peace enforcement because they might be unpopular following the US bombing; a superpower that is now alleged to be suggesting that the UK should secure and police Iraq because it has other national self-interests to pursue; a superpower that is prepared to risk ...”

“... thumbnail sketch of the Battle of Austerlitz, a quick explanation of the reason the Franco-British Peace of Amiens broke down in 1803, or to learn how many horses Napoleon lost in Russia (200,000), look no further. The style is very much that of traditional military and diplomatic history. Statesmen and generals make plans, issue orders, and vast armies begin ...”

“... to be from most of our rulers today. In 1950 when it was decided to go ahead with the H-bomb, David Lilienthal remarked: ‘Where this will lead us is difficult to see. We keep on saying, “We have no other course.” What we should be saying is, “We are not bright enough to see any other course.’ ” The interesting question is whether contemporary ...”