"MY PEACE I GIVE YOU..."

Sometimes profound thoughts can be prompted by the most trivial and commonplace of circumstances. Thirty-three years ago, in October 1980, I had a radio programme broadcast by the BBC to mark the then 60th anniversary of the founding of the League of Nations.

It was entitled Peace, Perfect Peace and took the form of a symposium of great minds across several millennia discussing the elusive nature of peace...

I had spent many hours in the place  where I always did my research in those pre-internet days – the British Library Reading Room at the British Museum. I called up books of speeches, essays, poetry and polemic in search of intriguing and inspiring quotes on the  topic of peace and its perennial enemy, war...

All this had slipped from my mind until, the other week, I came across one of the British Library book application slips that I had kept from that project. Why I retained this yellowing souvenir from a long-forgotten programme...?

Then I remembered.

The book requested was called quite simply Peace or War and had been published in 1898, the year that saw the outbreak of American-Spanish War...

The crosses in the bottom right-hand corner indicate that the British Library were unable to supply the book for reasons shown on the back of the slip.

And that reason was...?

Yes...  

Destroyed by bombing in the war!

So here,on this Remembrance Sunday (and sans, of course, anything from that bomb-destroyed book) is that programme....

PEACE, PERFECT PEACE