“... short stories from which equally mediocre horror films have been made; and Michael Howell and Peter Ford’s The True History of the Elephant Man. The best of the lot is the last, a well-researched and level-headed biography that tells us considerably more about Joseph Merrick than we knew before. For example: Treves recorded that he carried about with ...”

“... though Binyon, with customary care, thinks Cameroon the likelier origin. He was a gift for Peter the Great, and rose from servitude to become a general in the Army, responsible by the end of his career for all military engineering in Russia. Pushkin’s father belonged to a family that had distinguished itself in public affairs in the late 16th ...”

“... Knussen recognised the affinity, and coupled poems by Trakl and Plath in his Second Symphony, and Peter Maxwell Davies has also set Trakl to music. This new collection is the most substantial so far published in England, and should finally win Trakl wider recognition. Alexander Stillmark’s selection of around 125 ...”

“... was on secondment, as they used to say at the BBC. The real deputy editor was Oleg Kerensky, Alexander Kerensky’s grandson. The connection with world history made the thought of the job even more alluring – something to report to my father. The war had been the Listener’s heyday; in the 1940s it had a circulation of 100,000 or more; and, like the ...”

“... Doctors (as it is labelled today) which the prince takes to be a portrait of Christ between Saint Peter and Saint John – an intelligent response to the absence of orthodox narrative and to Christ’s apparent age in the painting. By contrast, when confronted by an animated double portrait such as Van Dyck’s painting of the first Earl of Strafford with his ...”

“... ornate, yet simple, splendour of Vierzehnheiligen’, notes the resemblances between Lu Chi and Alexander Pope, and sprinkles his text with impressive bits of Greek, Latin, Italian and German. He is, alas, fatally dull: ‘One could say of art what Lewis said of the Faerie Queene, that it is life itself in another mode.’ One could indeed, but one ...”

“... three of the four people who have had information about themselves embargoed: Princess Ashraf, Alexander Haig and Richard (‘Dick’) Helms. Manifestly evasive though the diaries are, they are nonetheless exceptionally illuminating on two issues: on the last years of the Shah’s regime, seen from the inside; and on how to try to nobble Britain’s media ...”

“... she believes, enables her to live life in a ‘higher reality’; and she becomes obsessed with Alexander Herzog, the book’s narrator, when she reads his first novel, ‘avidly, the way you guzzle an elixir’, and assumes he’s someone who could live in that higher reality with her. She cuts his picture out of a publisher’s catalogue and pins it up ...”

“... of the Observer and the New York Times, captured the now suspended CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, bragging to someone he believed was a potential client that he’d met Trump ‘many times’ and master-minded the entire Trump campaign strategy. Nix implies that those forty thousand votes were scientifically wrested from Hillary and delivered ...”

“... the Central Committee voted for freezing. By that time the body had decayed to such an extent that Alexander Pasternak, an architect and the brother of the poet, recorded nine different tones of decomposed flesh in a watercolour painting he made of the corpse. The embalming team, led by Vladimir Vorobiov, a professor of anatomy from Kharkov, removed Lenin’s ...”

“... we gleaned from German encrypted messages, but the chief of the SIS dissuaded him. Through Peter Floud, the brother of Bernard Floud, a Party member he had met in the Intelligence Corps, James arranged a meeting with a Russian who seemed to be an embassy official. (Sixty years later, after James’s death, it emerged that this was probably Ivan ...”

“... Walker supplies a ‘chronological table’ that correlates authors and titles with events (Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone the same year that Henry James published Roderick Hudson; Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems coincided with Coca-Cola’s adoption of its ‘distinctly shaped bottle’). Still, naturalists have their ...”

“... what happened. Before she left Britain, she had suggested that an agent be dropped into Germany. Alexander Foote was a Yorkshireman, a former coal merchant, chicken-feed sales manager and RAF deserter, who had run off to fight in the Spanish Civil War after getting a girl pregnant. He enthusiastically accepted the offer of a spying job, knowing only that ...”

“... away from Stoke Newington Road concealed nuclear pockets in the secret history of our culture: Alexander Baron’s The Lowlife (1963), set in a terrace off Amhurst Road, which was where the poet Tom Raworth (‘Raworth is the man in the Island with the word in his mouth’ – Ed Dorn) operated in his Matrix Press days. A few hundred yards to the north ...”

“... as the CIA’s private venture capital firm. One of Palantir’s founders, the billionaire Peter Thiel, described Christopher Columbus as ‘the first multiculturalist’, accused Aimé Césaire of not understanding the transcendental value of The Tempest and advocates for cyberspace, outer space and sea-steading as routes of escape from ‘the ...”