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“... The self-effacing authors of this excellent book aim to contribute some clear-headedness and penetration to what ought to be our great debate, but is too often our puzzle-headed mumble, about war. So exemplary is the clarity of their rich, varied and powerful argument that their hopes may well be realised. Good books about ethics and warfare – that is, books which can meet the military and political ‘realists’ on their own grounds, without sacrificing moral principle – are not as rare as they used to be ...”

“... The astounding story told in these pages is of how the country which came victoriously out of the First World War, ‘that bloody and ill-managed conflict’, with nearly two million soldiers in Belgium and France, a more than adequate industrial backing for them, and a growing habit of victory, at the start of the Second could send there only a thinly-backed 160,000 ...”

“... it explaining the mind of the British people to the British Government and the world? The editor, Geoffrey Dawson, played it whichever way he chose: now covertly carrying messages from the Foreign Office or the PM, now appearing to send messages to them; and neither the British public nor the world at large could tell the difference. Dawson and his staff were ...”

“... citizen.’ Childers confided to his constituents his ‘wish to see the people of England in the best sense military, but not warlike’ and his ambition to create ‘a system under which a much larger proportion of the youth of the country might, if they wished, voluntarily spend a short time . . . in the ranks. In an army really representing the average ...”

“... problem: why did certain sensible and decent persons in 1930s Britain persist in thinking the best of Hitler well after others, not evidently more sensible or decent, had come to think the worst? Of that miscellaneous assemblage of misguided men and women, Londonderry was one of the most conspicuous and respectable. He was a true-blue Conservative. He had ...”

“... in the 1930s, though a powerful one, didn’t believe Britain was rearming fast enough or in the best way, and loudly said so. For much of his material he relied on Lindemann, well equipped to help him thanks to his German background, statistical dexterity and Farnborough experience. Britain need not, they argued, be thought indefensible against the ...”

“... as well as to indicate the difficulties in the way of what remains to be done, and how these may best be tackled. ‘The task in fairness discourse is not to achieve quick, temporary relief ... but a grander objective. Step by step, slowly, we want to bring to the global agenda a heightened interest in making the expanding universe of international law ...”

“... Basil Liddell Hart was ‘the captain who taught generals’. His active participation in fighting was limited to three brief bursts during the First World War, the last and by far the worst ending with a nightmarish experience of panic and gas in Mametz Wood, on the Somme, which left him unfit for further front-line service. In proportion as the Army’s hold on him weakened, his critical interest in its mentality and methods increased ...”

“... to moderate or even to civilise war has been more rewarding. This jus in bello is the topic of Geoffrey Best’s fascinating book, a volume replete with scholarship and brilliant presentation. Moderate or civilised wars can only operate within certain limitations. They are almost impossible when there is a conflict of creeds as well as of state ...”

“... who believe that in war nothing is lawful, and for those for whom all things in war are lawful.’ Geoffrey Best, in his magnificent exposition of the modern pursuit of legal restraint on warfare, opens with another aphorism, from Hersch Lauterpacht: ‘If international law is, in some ways’ at the vanishing-point of law, the law of war is, perhaps even ...”

“... with which Brian Bond was associated was subtitled ‘A Yearbook of Military History’; and Geoffrey Best, himself the author of the brilliantly original Humanity and Warfare (1980), states in his general preface to the new Fontana series that ‘war and society’ comes to much the same thing as ‘war in history’. While the Social History ...”

“... an interpretative way. The latter recalls most of all a book which is now nearly twenty years old, Geoffrey Best’s Mid-Victorian Britain. Best’s survey had a much smaller chronological range and should perhaps be yoked with its companion volume in the Eric Hobsbawm-edited History of British ...”

“... Why two more Churchill biographies? Geoffrey Best reckons there are fifty or a hundred out there already. Two good reasons to want to add to them would be the unearthing of new evidence or a radically different interpretation. Roy Jenkins says he is not ‘a great partisan of the “revelatory” biography’, and claims that for Churchill nearly all the ‘facts’ are known in any case ...”

“... Geoffrey Grigson’s best poem, and the type of his best poetry, is ‘His Swans’. Evidently and justly, he thinks well enough of it to put it in the Faber Book of Reflective Verse as his sole exhibit: Remote music of his swans, their long Necks ahead of them, slow Beating of their wings, in unison, Traversing serene Grey wide blended horizontals Of endless sea and sky ...”

“... so much that they have had experience of the armed forces in combat – many have, but much of the best work comes from writers with civilian backgrounds. It is rather that the British experience of a modern ‘people’s war’ is exceptionally full. War and society have been inseparable, not only between 1939 and 1945, but also, since 1969, among the housing ...”