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“... by Palmerston. A traditional view of him as sabre-rattling John Bull has been qualified by David Brown in his new biography, but it was scarcely without foundation.[*] Three weeks after Palmerston became prime minister, Nicholas died. His successor, the far more liberal Alexander II, was eager for peace, but when talks ...”

“... War, it ordered the detention of people of Japanese ancestry regardless of their citizenship. Alexander Hamilton described the judiciary as the ‘least dangerous branch’ of government, since it could neither wage war nor impose taxes. Clearly, though, the Supreme Court doesn’t want for power, sitting above 850 federal judges in lower courts.The size ...”

“... on the black plastic decking, not knowing what to do with myself. Some Afghan workers in Kellogg, Brown and Root T-shirts started lowering the flags. ‘Those fucking flags spend more time at half-mast than they do up,’ one soldier said as he walked past. 1 July. The flags will stay at half-mast today. The Grenadier Guards were hit by a suicide bomber as ...”

“... President or Prime Minister or Secretary of State saw himself as another Bismark or Napoleon or Alexander. Naturally, the result was disaster, and of course the disaster could have been averted and turned into a triumph if the hapless statesman had been a better historian, or, more to the point, if he had been either Neustadt or May. The megalomania of this ...”

“... simply stamped out; with the Pre-Raphaelites, there was indeed such a potential – he cited Madox Brown’s house, where ‘there were not only artists but also atheists, political refugees, vagrants: there was the kind of widening which was questioning the order of a much wider area’ – and this did link to Morris’s development. But Williams could not ...”

“... to leave the country in a hurry after some ambiguous financial transactions. Inspired by Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Coubertin needed all his considerable reserves of enthusiasm to overlook the less attractive aspects of the British public schools he visited. The intellectual traveller, and even more so the refugee, lives in a constant tension between his ...”

“... in varying degrees of Brexit: Cameron, Johnson and Rees-Mogg; Zac Goldsmith and Jesse Norman; Alexander Nix, the co-founder of Cambridge Analytica; Nigel Oakes, the founder of its sinister parent company, SCL; Kwasi Kwarteng, the son of Ghanaian immigrants and a King’s Scholar at Eton, who went on to Cambridge and Harvard and eventually became ...”

“... must explain her hazardous use of words. She’d met Sandy, her husband, when he drove one of the Alexander buses about the town of Elgin. She happened to be the clippy on the same bus, and she would often tell me about the beauty of those single-decker vehicles (‘the Bluebird’) and the handsomeness of Sandy behind the wheel. Now she was furious all the ...”

“... and a reproduced Camel cigarette packet: ‘from use’. The full works – chocolate-brown cloth, Brainard dustwrapper, author photo (flat cap, jeans, sandals, thumbs-hooked-in-belt) – yours for £1.50. Shamefully good value. You owed it to the poet to make a decent fist of reading the thing. Now, in an era of cut-throat discounts, peel-away ...”

“... history’ such as those outlined by the American writers David Christian and Cynthia Stokes Brown – or, in the terminology of Edward O. Wilson, in a ‘consilience’, a convergence of intellectual disciplines, humanities with science. Ultimately, all teaching in the fine arts department pays a kind of homage to self-will. First defined in the 15th ...”

“... and ended up, perhaps, ‘fishing and shooting’ on the southern coast of Jamaica, looking ‘as brown as some people of colour’.In the Old World, free movement of labour was at most an annoyance to the ruling class. On the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, it posed an existential threat. In Saint-Domingue on the eve of the revolution, 90 per cent of the ...”

“... exceptions, no crossovers, no poets who manage to be both with and without history? There is one: Alexander Blok, ‘a pure lyricist who did have development and history and a path’. But then Tsvetaeva corrects herself almost immediately. ‘Development’ is not the word she wants. ‘Development presupposes harmony. Can there be a development which is ...”

“... spent their off-season studying the game of the faux-populists, and now have them in their sights. Alexander Clapp Hungary and the Czech RepublicMembership of the EU has allowed several hundred thousand Hungarians to escape by emigration the increasingly punitive conditions of life under Viktor Orbán. One of the most striking features of Hungary since ...”

“... that before there can be solidarity, a little humility would help.Towards​ the end of 1826, Alexander Pushkin was playing chess with a friend who, as he put it, ‘knew a lot of the kinds of thing they study in universities while we were learning to dance’. The friend checkmated Pushkin with his knight and remarked: ‘Cholera morbus is at our ...”

“... Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July 1979 ...”