“... II’s regal dates fit, roughly 1295-1272 BCE, and so do the names: Alaksandu cannot be other than Alexander, which happens to be the other name of Paris, he who stole away the wife and treasure of Menelaus, but it is certainly the name of a decidedly Greek ruler. Wilusa is most definitely Troy. The book we know as Iliad is the adjective for the city of Ilios ...”

“... stylings could only sedate the rumblings for so long, and then, as if fired from a cannon, came Alexander Portnoy wagging his dingdong and marauding for shiksas.The tremendous, scandalous success of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), that pyrotechnical display of flying ejaculate, stopped-up bowels, Jewish angst and mother-woe, revived and inflamed accusations ...”

“... Alexander Cockburn​ blamed Ian Fleming for the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars ...”

“... of this realisation came his interest in such non-cowardly homosexuals as T.E. Lawrence (Ross) and Alexander the Great (Adventure Story). But perhaps the question to be asked is: why should a heterosexual writer adopt a gay point of view? What’s the benefit, not to the person, but to the novel? There needs to be some novelistic payoff, if we accept that the ...”

“... suffered. There is something in this. The famous 1967 study of German psychology by Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich had the title Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: the incapacity to mourn, rather than the incapacity to empathise with others. It was not that postwar Germans lacked self-pity. How could they fail to be sorry for themselves when they remembered ...”

“... attempted some such mischief in my novel Box Hill.) Discussing Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, Germaine Greer remarked that reaction to the novel would have been rather different if the narrator’s love object, the young man whose tutor he is, had been female. These days there can be a blanket ...”

“... University of Sussex in 1986. But she would like us, she said, to see Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander if we could, and to read ‘The Immortal Story’ by Isak Dinesen, ‘whom I have since discovered has become rather trrrendy’ (a film had just been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring Robert ...”

“... for new political figures who burst brightly on the scene was: ‘Don’t be a Kerensky!’ Alexander Kerensky was the leader of the February Revolution in 1917 and briefly the darling of the democratic world until the Bolsheviks consigned him to the dustbin of history nine months later. He spent the last 53 years of his life eking out a living as a ...”

“... read The Fountainhead at high school, and both were besotted by it. Quickly, very quickly, these star-struck, good-looking youngsters became Rand’s best friends, surrogate children, protégés and heirs. In 1953, Nathan and Barbara married; in 1954, Nathan changed his name to Nathaniel Branden. Early in 1955, according to The Passion of Ayn Rand, the ...”

“... names of Paul Ives, Graham Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan Police Force in the 1960s. Until very recently, it was thought, in-house, to be a legitimate ...”

“... literature in the life of the country. ‘The USSR has lost its spiritual goal, its ideal,’ said Alexander Mikhailov, an official of the Writers’ Union and editor of Literary Workshop: Our revolution overthrew not only the Tsar but throne and God together. In place of God, the people were offered the world revolution and the victory of Communism. But ...”

“... on screen was reduced in the editing room simply because he would draw attention away from the star. After Lord Jim he said: ‘I’ll never do another film where I have anything to say to the star.’ When he played in a television version of Waiting for Godot in 1961, the problem was identified by Louis MacNeice in a ...”

“... Mailer’s wingman to be. The stern upholder of heterosexual norms was a later guise. Along with star-spangled kitsch such as My Love Affair with America and neocon tracts such as The Bloody Crossroads, The Present Danger and World War IV, Podhoretz fathered a pair of sequels to Making It, further investigations of the wonder of himself. This was not ...”

“... in 1852, became a sensation and may have contributed to the liberation of the serfs in 1861 (Alexander II is said to have claimed it as an influence on his decision). For the rest of his life, Turgenev was the most famous Russian in Europe. His celebrity, but also the novelty of his presence, is reflected in the baffling variety in contemporary spellings ...”

“... had tripped over one of Caroline’s dolls and broken his neck in the White House nursery’ – Alexander Cockburn, the Nation, 6 January 1992. The third argument is micro-historical. It punctures holes in the details, brings up contradictory testimony, offers alternative hypotheses. It tends to trail off into indeterminacy: we’ll never know who did ...”