“... churches. He places the emergence of the modern state too early and exaggerates its centralised powers. The court, like the bourgeoisie, is always rising, in a way calculated to cause modern eyebrows to rise with it. Elias’s underlying assumptions can also be questioned. He recognised that the term ‘civilised’ needs inverted commas, but that has not ...”

“... or survived – the Cold War, but so did the bomb. In fact, the bomb proliferated, and new nuclear powers emerged, driven by conflicts scarcely related to superpower confrontation. Thanks to the collapse of communism, we are no longer sure that ‘the golden age is within us,’ as Lévi-Strauss said, but there’s no doubt that the apocalypse is. And the fear ...”

“... in the first, formative years after the Bolshevik Revolution, when almost all the capitalist powers sent military forces to support the Bolsheviks’ opponents in the Civil War, most of the resident foreigners, with the exception of Comintern personnel, were indeed quasi-spies reporting to some foreign intelligence agency, even those with good contacts ...”

“... in his complaints about European free-riders. Others attribute its origins to the persuasive powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David Lammy). Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its ...”

“... 1798, Pitt introduced income tax. This was not a strikingly original conception. Two years earlier Thomas Love Peacock, aged 11, had written that while he did not wish ‘Mr Pitt’s removal from his exalted station’, he thought Pitt ‘would have acted more in conformity with the wishes of the People had he taxed everyone according to their ...”

“... a long history in political thought, not least in relation to the expansion of European imperial powers. But it was in Spanish America that its modern form – applied to non-imperial or non-colonial nation states – was first put into effective use as a diplomatic norm. 3. By the late 1820s, all of Spain’s former colonies in the Americas, apart from Cuba ...”

“... for particular effects, in ‘Wolf Tongue’ (1978), for example, he faked an excellent version of Thomas Chatterton’s (already fake) mode. Another poem in his ambit is probably Douglas Oliver’s The Infant and the Pearl (1985), a dream-allegorical confrontation in which malign powers are named with outlandish blazons ...”

“... there were rival, Catholic claimants to the British throne backed by the other main European naval powers, France and Spain. Even in the 1780s, Britain was engaged in a frantic naval race against these two countries, which France might have won. European imperatives, and persistent and legitimate fears that the Catholic ...”

“... with questions of biography. Given the fates that overtook his colleagues Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd in 1593 and 1594 – the one stabbed to death at 29, the other eventually dying after an extensive and painful interrogation – you could argue that Shakespeare might have felt that he had been living on borrowed time since the age of thirty. Ben ...”

“... hand ‘so we might have some conception of the amount of genius that slavery is murdering’. But Thomas Jefferson compared her to a parrot and thought her poems ‘below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of The Dunciad are to her as Hercules to the author of that poem.’ In a context where figures including Kant and Hume used aesthetics to confirm racist ...”

“... of Bismarck, of Napoleon III, on the Empire born of Queen Elizabeth I, on that Papacy of which Thomas Hobbes said that ‘it is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire sitting crowned on its own grave.’ In this splendid pre-war novel we meet Thomas Quayne, a successful businessman, and his smart wife ...”

“... in his sometime melodrama, his lush wordscapes, his focus on eros and elegy – is Dylan Thomas. Powell has (as Thomas did not) a love for rough edges, an attention (sometimes unwilling) to popular culture and an ear for other people’s speech: but he has, too, Thomas’s ...”

“... to his reality-level, his responsiveness to the accidental humour and freakish poetry of life. Thomas Pynchon uses names like Oedipa Maas and Pig Bodine (where the effect is slangy, jivey, cartoonish); at the other end of the scale, John Braine offers us Tom Metfield, Jack Royston, Jane Framsby (can these people really exist, in our minds or anywhere ...”

“... Hague that US aid to the Nicaraguan Contras was not ‘purely humanitarian’. Larry Minear and Thomas Weiss respond that ‘humanitarianism is simply what the International Committee of the Red Cross does.’ Among the 1949 Geneva Conventions is a provision for the protection of humanitarian relief, with strict conditions to ensure that this brings minimum ...”

“... the famous Somerset Decision, which was taken to have outlawed slavery on English soil. In 1787, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce began their campaign against the slave trade. Parliament eventually voted to end the trade in 1807; the United States followed suit in 1808. Slavery in the British West Indies was abolished in 1834, and even the tenacious ...”