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“... The Spy who Saved D-Day (336 pp., £19.99, 25 May 2000, 1 873162 81 2) is the work of Tomás Harris, Pujol’s MI5 controller. Pujol was so keen to work against the Nazis that he started sending the Abwehr freelance disinformation from Lisbon even before the British recruited him. Eventually they agreed to take him on and he went to London in April ...”

“... himself compared Comte’s ideas on altruism to the ecstatic, self-sacrificing fervour of Thomas à Kempis). And, although by the turn of the century ‘altruism’ had been absorbed into sermons by Anglican bishops like Boyd Carpenter and Winnington-Ingram, and by the Congregationalist preacher Hugh Pryce Hughes, the precise cultural and imaginative ...”

“... representative of the Age of Reason. In particular, he hoped to challenge the condescension of Thomas Carlyle, who dismissed Hume as an associate of Voltaire and the French philosophes, and a slave to the ‘obscurations of sense, which eclipse this truth within us’. Hume had imagined, according to Carlyle, that the mechanistic logic with which he ...”

“... out complex arrangements of the most exotic trees and plants. Like his Norfolk contemporary Sir Thomas Browne, he admired the fact that a tree could ‘generate its like without violation of Virginity’. But he was no Swampy or tree-hugger. His plans for giant plantations of trees had a military and industrial purpose: they were eventually to be felled to ...”

“... was called outside the South) in Delaware in the 1970s, as his future running mate, Kamala Harris, pointed out in a primary debate (though it was later revealed that they were both in favour of the half-measure of voluntary busing). In 1977 he moved from the Senate’s banking committee to the judiciary committee, where he focused on crime ...”

“... to be made, given that relations remained so close for so long? Presumably, we have Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826, ‘revolutionary politician and president of the United States’) but not Dwight Eisenhower because the former was born in what was still a British colony, though the latter spent more time in this country and arguably had a greater ...”

“... After the Reformation, ‘maumet’ began to be used as a derogatory epithet for Catholic idols: Thomas Becon, for example, complains of ‘antichristian monsters’ who teach people ‘to run a Pilgrimage to this and that Idol, to paint this tabernacle, and to gild that maumet’. The Island Princess’s ‘maumet gods’ would have registered as an ...”

“... the use of handguns and rifles to curb gun violence in black and brown neighbourhoods, Clarence Thomas appropriated the rhetoric of black self-defence to uphold the right of American citizens to ‘keep and bear arms’. Thomas’s concurring opinion stated that white supremacist groups spread terror among blacks and ...”

“... His career began auspiciously in the early 1940s with the enthusiastic support of his hero Dylan Thomas, but the surrealism of his early collections, such as Cage without Grievance and 2ND Poems, seemed to mark him out as an oddity who could easily be ignored. The White Threshold in 1949 and The Nightfishing in 1955 made a conscious break with his earliest ...”

“... eat only in non-chains, never hurry, spend a day in San Antonio meeting a man I’ll call Don Harris, for whom Michael might design a house, write songs to perform at an open mike in Nashville. Charlie would ride in the bed of the truck, and we would have the cab. I tied his long leash to the truck’s roll bar, so he’d know not to jump out. Michael ...”

“... his spouse to a dazed friend with ‘That’s My First Wife Up There, and This Is the Present Mrs Harris.’ The first Mrs Harris seems to be crouched on all fours on the top of a very high (glazed) bookcase, just behind the second Mrs Harris. This image has found an appreciative audience ...”

“... before the public. Attlee was officially recognised as a great man with the publication of Kenneth Harris’s biography in 1982. Harris enlarged Attlee’s stature in two different respects. It had always been suspected that Attlee, though something of a dark horse, was a wholly sane and balanced human being of absolute ...”

“... figures such as Leibniz and Wordsworth, as well as more obscure ones like Destutt de Tracy and Thomas Sprat, historian of the Royal Society. In each case Aarsleff never fails to say something interesting or to bring out some nuance in the part they played as contributors to the thread of history he is trying to follow through. Probably the most intriguing ...”

“... whose guerrilla skills became a model for later insurgencies. Foden does not conceal his debt to Thomas Pakenham’s classic history, The Boer War (1979). A less skilful novelist might have been tempted to exaggerate the plight of Ladysmith, but Foden does not pretend that the town was ever at its last gasp, and agrees that it could have been held for ...”

“... various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the long-deified Mrs Siddons and very many more. There were peers of the realm, baronets, famous churchmen, a duchess. One hundred ...”