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“... first half of their first volume of A Social History of British Broadcasting Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff seem scarcely to try. As they tread the well-worn path through the BBC’s approaches – first as a company, then as a corporation – to politics and international affairs and the General Strike and the Abdication crisis and all the other familiar ...”

“... since become accessible and fine monographs been written on almost every aspect of Nazi Germany in peace and war. It is more difficult to think of profound new insights and conceptual breakthroughs, however. The Marxist-Leninist angle (Hitler as the running dog of monopoly capitalism) has had its day, and so have psycho-history and sundry structuralist and ...”

“... accompanied by the devoted Ruth, who is a Moabite and will become the progenitrix of the line of David. This is striking because elsewhere in the Bible all intercourse with Moab is prohibited. Havrelock shrewdly notes that Ruth and Naomi are a reversal of Lot’s daughters, who incestuously engendered the Moabites and their neighbours the Ammonites. Of all ...”

“... to Istanbul.) Ernst’s talk soon takes a strange turn. He speaks about how his brother had found peace in his work and his family. But that ‘on one point he could not master himself so as to find inner peace’: there was something that stirred in him the deepest sentiments, raised in him bitterness, even hatred: it was ...”

“... for politics – I’m a composer first and last. Any government that lets me write my music in peace, publishes everything I compose before the ink is dry, and performs every note that comes from my pen is all right with me. In Europe we all have to fish for performances, cajole conductors and theatre directors; in Russia they come to me – I can hardly ...”

“... she has been sleeping with someone else. They have an implausible duel of words and make a sort of peace. Although they later get divorced we are to imagine he will never stop thinking of her, alive or dead, but Scott and his screenwriter, David Scarpa, seem to have gone to sleep for this part of the story, leaving the film ...”

“... Delhi, Beirut or wherever and the police start shooting ordinary citizens in order to preserve the peace, the television watcher develops a clear visual impression of what the word ‘violence’ signifies in contemporary English. To apply the same term to the ritual obscenities of bottle-throwing soccer fans somehow seems misplaced. ...”

“... that the complex and intractable conflicts of the Middle East pose a far greater threat to world peace than the ugly fight in the South Atlantic ever did. Despite the windy rhetoric about principles, the Falklands conflict has been a comparatively simple one about sovereignty over disputed territory, involving national prestige – and therefore the ...”

“... been the right man to run the war, but had no serious qualifications as an architect of domestic peace. But as Paul Addison rightly suggests in Churchill on the Home Front, Churchill has been ‘generally overestimated as a military leader and underestimated in civilian affairs’. It is true that Churchill was fascinated by military matters: as ...”

“... a sense of deep pointlessness’. Because the body in pain can be neither fully rational nor at peace, it simultaneously undermines the Cartesian divide between mind and body and the Hobbesian opposition between war and peace, and so threatens the very idea of a rationally chosen, scientifically governed society. Nervous ...”

“... narrative so explosive that it can only be told in fiction. In the real world of secret history, peace and civilisation depend on dramatic personal interventions at moments of crisis. There is no inevitability, no impersonal forces. One man with his stiletto, or a hijacked cargo, or a set of plans, can change destiny; another man with his service revolver ...”

“... of the church, the rise of intolerance, the spirit of the Crusades – blame it on Constantine. David Potter punctures this inflated image. This doesn’t mean he cuts Constantine down to size: far from it. Potter has done something far more difficult. He has examined, with gusto and an unrivalled mastery of detail, the aspects of Constantine neglected by ...”

“... director of operations was Churchill’s son-in-law, Duncan Sandys. Its legal draftsman was Sir David Maxwell Fyfe QC, a right-wing libertarian with potent credentials as a principal prosecutor at Nuremberg. It was Maxwell Fyfe who told a Conservative Party rally in 1948 that just as Nazism had crept first gradually and then irresistibly into German ...”

“... turned critical of the Soviet Union, bitterly disappointing their hosts, were excoriated.Michael David-Fox’s Showcasing the Great Experiment is the story of Soviet wooing of the Western intelligentsia, focusing on VOKS under Kameneva and Arosev. About a hundred thousand foreigners visited the Soviet Union in the prewar period, many of them left-leaning ...”

“... for dead. The last full-scale history of English literature that anybody has bothered over was David Daiches’s two-volume Critical History of English Literature. When it appeared, in 1960, it was thought gallant but defeated. For a successful history of English from a single pen, we must no doubt go back to Saintsbury, who is still readable. There is ...”