“... properly if the Allies trusted one another, and if they acted competently. When in 1941 two Danes, Thomas Sneum and Kjeld Pedersen, filmed a new kind of German radar station, then flew a homemade plane across the North Sea with their evidence, MI5 were first suspicious then ruined all but two frames of their film.Clandestine newspapers displayed a similar ...”

“... and an uncanny end. Against Camillo’s advice in the play, Morgan makes a wild dedication of his powers to unpath’d waters, undream’d shores, but his excess has method in it, however outlandish. As in the poem ‘Heaven’, and the remarkably achieved ‘Alphabet of Goddesses’. Jeffrey Wainright’s Selected Poems are taken from The Important Man ...”

“... to bridge the Cartesian gulf, philosophical anthropology relates our states of mind to our vital powers and through them to our being in the world; or again, it investigates the ways in which man in his status of ‘defective creature’ compensates for his vulnerability and ‘openness to the world’. All such enquiries proceed by reflecting on data which ...”

“... so creatively if the book had not made a huge impression ten years before. The witty knight – as Thomas Shelton, Cervantes’s contemporary and most sinewy English translator, termed Don Quixote – had ridden instantly into the world’s imagination along with his squire. Even so, Cervantes may have had one reason at least to be grateful to the apocryphal ...”

“... Darkened with Celts’ and Saxons’ blood’, composed in an idiom which melds Yeats and Edward Thomas. Times, or places, have changed since the poet of ‘Bone Dreams’ pushed ‘past philology and kennings’ in a retaliatory ‘invasion of England’. Still more fascinating is the case of a writer who leaves England for America ...”

“... inept use of personification can also prompt the cortex-crunching Johnsonian boff to the head: in Thomas Gray’s ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’, ‘his supplication to father Thames, to tell him who drives the hoop or tosses the ball, is useless and puerile. Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself.’ Johnson’s ...”

“... 1930s into the literary forgeries perpetrated by two eminent men of the literary establishment, Thomas Wise and H. Buxton Forman. What seems most significant about that story, apart from its being half a century old, is that Carter and Pollard were dealers in rare books, who at the time of their celebrated Enquiry did not hold university ...”

“... impressive to the imagination. Talented writers have been drawn to the tale. One of them, Dylan Thomas, made nothing of it at all. Mr Edwards suggests that it made a difference that Burke was Irish. He does not mean that murder is Irish; nor does he say that ill-treated migrant or immigrant workers may fall to ill-treating and selling their own kind at ...”

“... from the life of the stylist, an image of a brilliant individual stretched on the rack of his own powers of imagination and goaded to high heaven by the trials of being gifted. Stevenson’s was a life full of creative compulsions – including the compulsion to be compulsive – and more than other writers he stepped into the role, appearing always to ...”

“... American idiom’ everywhere else. His businessman father, of English descent, grew up in St Thomas in the Virgin Islands; his mother, a frustrated painter, came from Puerto Rico. After high school in Switzerland and New York City, Williams took a degree in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Hilda Doolittle (later H.D.) and ...”

“... as to those who tried a hopeless armed rising in 1848. Bew unearths a fascinating prophecy made by Thomas D’Arcy McGee (ex-revolutionary turned successful Irish emigrant) immediately afterwards: The people are not to blame that there has not been a revolution. Next time they must trust in local leaders like the Raparees and the Catalonian chiefs – fierce ...”

“... of opinion. What were once social democratic parties now rely largely on the votes of what Thomas Piketty has called the ‘Brahmin left’: the liberal-minded yet privileged section of society, whose one shared experience is higher education.In recent years, as liberalism has faltered, universities have been dragged into political conflicts to which ...”

“... American, originally published in 1955, the insights in which still bite. Greene’s narrator, Thomas Fowler, a cynical British journalist who smokes opium, keeps a teenage Vietnamese mistress named Phuong and sounds like Greene himself, is befriended by Alden Pyle, a quiet young American who is trying to build a Third Force, neither Communist nor ...”

“... in trenches. In Black Garden (2003), his authoritative book on the recent history of the region, Thomas de Waal writes that ‘in untangling the roots of the Karabakh conflict, we should first of all dismiss the idea that this was an “ancient conflict”. Both the form and the content of the Armenia-Azerbaijan dispute date back little more than one hundred ...”

“... whom are basically human (hobbits, dwarfs, the men of Gondor and Rohan), some superhuman in both powers and goodness (elves, wizards, men of royal blood), some superhuman but evil (ringwraiths), some subhuman but sturdy with it (orcs, trolls). There are no monks or monasteries; in fact there is no religious activity on Middle Earth at all.The story begins in ...”