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“... 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 power. The wars of ...”

“... even if they water down, the more acute trials the state afflicts in adolescence, when your Best Friend of one day can speedily disown, his hostility armed with a full knowledge of your weak points, gleaned during the period of your intimacy. No wonder experts on the subject lay far greater stress on loyalty in friendship than in love, or even in ...”

“... of tall travellers’ tales from Swift and Voltaire to Lewis Carroll and Samuel Butler. Professor Nicholas Caritat, unworldly scholar of the Enlightenment, is forced out of Militaria, his savagely autocratic homeland, and sent off by an improbable plot device in pursuit of the best of all possible societies. His first port ...”

“... contempt for the Egyptians. I felt high. I had just been reading War and Peace and recognised Nicholas Rostov’s exhilaration before the battle of Austerlitz. The bus crept downhill into the unpaved lanes south of Pyramids Street. They were choked with vehicles coming off the main road where the action was. There was a lot of backing, advancing and ...”

“... the least resistance was found, like nuclear dumps today. But among stations that made the best of this now desirable isolation from the buzz of the world I recall a country restaurant which survived for many years in the Good Food Guide in spite of a correspondent’s happy description: ‘Mr Johnson is in the bar, and by the end of the evening the ...”

“... to the result. She thus succeeded one of Europe’s outstanding politiclowns, the late Sir Nicholas Fairbairn. Normally garbed in tartanic garments designed by his own hand and inhabiting a nearby castle, Sir Nicholas had been famously critical of the SNP’s open-door citizenship policy which would, for ...”

“... solved: how to keep busy, avoid trouble, stay happy and remain hopeful, while fretting away the best years of their lives waiting for the monarch to die. Thus regarded, Prince Charles’s present predicament is no exception to this general royal rule. On the contrary, it is very familiar. For all its privileges of rank and wealth, being heir to the British ...”

“... our historical understanding, and unless it can be met, the study of English iconoclasm will be at best half a success. Those who, fashionably, lament the destruction of images on artistic grounds do not know how lucky they are to look at an image and be able to see only a picture or a statue: they have no need to grapple with the power an image enjoyed in the ...”

“... his age excepting G. M. Hopkins and Hardy. Before describing how Places of the Mind retrieves his best work from the margin of literature I will suggest why The City of Dreadful Night was mislaid there. Its settled gloom is only part of the explanation. Dante’s Inferno, though gloomier than the Purgatorio and Paradiso, is more popular. Thomson’s inferno ...”

“... so martyrdom in the primitive Church was prima facie evidence of sanctity. It was also one of the best recruiting tools the new religion had, for the impressive liturgies, the great cathedrals and the dazzling intellectual achievements came later. But the authentic Acts of the Martyrs are sober documents, and do not linger over accounts of torture any more ...”

“... Sidney wanted ‘popular government’ because, as Machiavelli had argued, it was the best form of government for making war. Success abroad could be sustained only by freedom at home. Only governments in which the people participated could afford to arm them. Republics thrived when citizens ‘fought for themselves’, an experience which ...”

“... Beech and Honeydew, that she wrote so frequently about the theatre because it was what she knew best, but also because ‘it is [the actors’] business to give every reaction its due and then some. In that respect they can be said to be unusually truthful. This makes them good material for detective fiction.’ ‘Truthful’ in a rather unusual ...”

“... part of this statement than in the second. Here are 15 essays, of somewhat uneven standard, the best of which are well worth consideration by anyone interested in probing behind current political events. About half of the contributors are listed as fellows of Oxford colleges, chiefly All Souls, and their essays give the most consistent ideological tinge to ...”

“... 6, No 6), this represents a considerable feat of expansion – but no other kind of feat. At its best, Bardic Romance rose to the sort of picturesque realism that Stephen Dedalus pastiched in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’: The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden. Canvasclimbers who sailed with ...”

“... to Scripture. As was usually the case, the instigator of this accusation was a converted Jew, Nicholas Donin. The only king who answered the Pope’s call was the pious Louis IX of France, later canonised, whose views on the Jewish question were thought to be admirably forthright: the best way to carry on a disputation ...”