“... 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 ...”

“... Home Rule for Ireland​ would have given a new parliament in Dublin far fewer powers than Holyrood has today, but the mere prospect dominated British politics for extended periods over more than three decades. Three Home Rule Bills came before Parliament, in 1886, 1893 and 1912. The first was rejected by the Commons; the second was defeated in the Lords; the third passed the Commons, with the Liberal minority government being supported by the nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by John Douglas as ‘the father of behavioural profiling’. Douglas is the FBI man who inspired Thomas Harris to invent the character Jack Crawford in the Hannibal Lecter novels, so he should know. This is the psychological portrait Brussel came up with of the Mad Bomber: He’s symmetrically built … neither fat nor skinny … a co-operative worker ...”

“... world famous, yet ultimately human enough for their allied Anglo-Tibetan opponents to outwit them. Thomas Goodfellowe MP, fictional hero as battered old teddy bear, is due for another outing this autumn, says the blurb. By then, where will our real-life hero, the Dalai Lama, be? Thomas Carlyle was wrong, on the whole, about ...”

“... MacDonald, accompanied by Philip Snowden, chancellor in both Labour governments, and J.H. Thomas, colonial secretary in 1924, joined the National Government dominated by the Conservatives. After that, the shortcomings of the 1924 government came to be regarded as a rehearsal for the more profound betrayal of 1931. The Labour government elected in ...”

“... The likely transience of British glory could strike artists abroad still more powerfully. Thomas Cole, one of two British emigrants to the United States examined here, devoted five canvases to The Course of Empire, tracing the progress of an imaginary society from savage potential to imperial consummation, and on relentlessly to destruction and ...”

“... the reformer Granville Sharp prosecuted a man named Stapylton who had taken his runaway slave, Thomas Lewis, forcibly on board ship. The trial judge, Lord Mansfield, tried to evade the moral issue by directing the jury that the case depended simply on whether Lewis was Stapylton’s property. The jury returned a verdict that Lewis was not, but Mansfield ...”

“... justify plucking an archaic remedy (legislative removal of the executive despite the separation of powers) from the Constitutional museum? To do so, they had to exaggerate wildly the magnitude of the damage done to the country by Clinton’s attempt to draw a veil of secrecy over his unconsummated fumblings with a young woman who was not his wife. In the ...”

“... years ago I was lucky enough to hear the great Jeannie Robertson, then at the height of her powers as a singer in Scots of anything from ‘classic’ ballads to sheer bawdy. During a sunny lunchtime in Cambridge, after giving a formal recital, she sat outside a pub drinking, talking and singing. One of the ‘travelling people’, turned Aberdeen ...”

“... and servants. Another point of triangulation is the concept of the preternatural, promulgated by Thomas Aquinas and described in an essay by Lorraine Daston as ‘that twilight zone between the natural and the supernatural’. As Daston notes, the preternatural was a particularly influential idea in the High Middle Ages – uncanny and marvellous, positioned ...”

“... that would make Joseph Goebbels proud’. Eurozone finance ministers found Varoufakis hard work. Thomas Wieser, the former head of the Eurogroup Working Group, an advisory body to Eurozone finance ministers, recently told a Swiss newspaper that during meetings Varoufakis kept up long monologues, delaying real negotiations in the hope that a last-minute panic ...”