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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”