“... struggle, natural disaster, or perhaps the emancipation of women? In 1984, the German scholar Alexander Demandt carefully catalogued the 210 explanations so far proposed. There have been many more since: climate change and disease are particularly high on the 21st-century academic agenda; the best discussion of them is Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome ...”

“... and Edwardians. But Wells adds that ‘there would be no killing, no lethal chambers’. Peter Morton in The Vital Science (1984) shows how Wells, following such precursors as Alfred Russel Wallace and Grant Allen, soon became the champion of a ‘social reformist eugenics’, looking to female emancipation, birth control and the Welfare State to ...”

“... sketch, of which the finest example is ‘Aunt Helen’. Eliot, whom Yeats had spoken of as ‘an Alexander Pope ... satirist rather than poet’, is not represented in this volume at all. It is in general a relief, in the later sections of this volume, to turn from the strident coupleteering patnesses of Campbell and others to the fondly nurtured exactitudes ...”

“... or ‘populists’ – and had helped to manufacture the bomb that killed Tsar Alexander II in 1881. He was one of the first to be hanged in the subsequent crackdown. Viktor’s father, Leonid, was less distinguished: although he had been a populist sympathiser, he had ended up in Europe for more quotidian reasons, in particular gambling ...”

“... back tae snowk at his bockin ... Grumphie douks i the burn, an syne rows again i the glaur. (II Peter 2.22: ‘The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire’). Except perhaps for a few scholars, no one, however Scots, is going to know all the words in this translation; most Scots will not know a great ...”

“... Italian city. Hardly a minnow can have slipped through the net, though it has landed one whopper: Alexander Trippel, who was Swiss and described by a German in 1782 as ‘the greatest sculptor in Rome, that is to say the world’, is included as if he were an obscure British artist known only because he exported a relief and a portrait bust. This slip is of ...”

“... and their elegance. Rabies has Louis Pasteur, smallpox has Edward Jenner. Who has heard of Peter Panum? Even the book about the institution where he spent most of his career, S.E. Stybe’s Copenhagen University: Five Hundred Years of Science and Scholarship (1979), while acknowledging his importance as a founder of modern physiology, fails to mention ...”

“... Incidentally, they know you know they know you know the code.’ Peter Ustinov’s Cold War satire Romanoff and Juliet (1956) could have been about Salisbury Court, the London home in the early 1580s of the French Ambassador to the Court of Elizabeth I, Michel de Castelnau, seigneur de Mauvissière, an establishment described by John Bossy as ‘zany, convivial and leak-ridden ...”

“... seers were kidnapped en masse by the Persians and the oracle was left in ruins. It was revived by Alexander nearly two hundred years later. Alexander also found the descendants of the Branchids in the place the Persians had put them. He slaughtered every last one of them, for treachery to the cause of the Greeks. Back ...”

“... Louis IX under the Treaty of Paris, peace with Llywelyn in Wales, with another brother-in-law, Alexander II in Scotland. The only man with whom he never came to a lasting understanding was Montfort (yet another brother-in-law).In short, nothing could be less like the conventional idea of a pugnacious Plantagenet than the fair nine-year-old child who came ...”

“... behind the scenes in September 2015. The most compelling account is Die Getriebenen by Robin Alexander, a correspondent for the conservative paper Die Welt. He was given intimate access to Merkel’s entourage, and offers an unsparing portrait of the German political class as it struggled to cope with the crisis, largely by refusing to take ...”

“... initiated by Suu Kyi, and obediently agreed by the NLD executive, has been just as unexpected. Peter Popham’s life of Aung San Suu Kyi is gripping, partisan and emotional, a welcome complement to the only other serious biography in English, Justin Wintle’s assiduously comprehensive Perfect Hostage. It contains fascinating new material and ...”

“... War was looming when Alexander Korda’s film Fire over England was released in 1937. It stars Flora Robson as Elizabeth I, and as the opening titles roll the voiceover sets the scene: ‘the free people of a small island’ defy the tyranny of a Continental power and ‘a woman guides and inspires them.’ Robson, firm of jaw and bristling with double-decker ruffs and farthingales, outwits the dastardly Spanish and the Armada is defeated ...”

“... in Dallas ran a conference in November. Nor is More much celebrated outside academia and St Peter’s. The fate of the Romanov obelisk in Moscow’s Alexander Garden, first put up in 1914 to mark the tercentenary of the dynasty, is illustrative. Bolsheviks re-engraved the obelisk with More’s name and other mooted ...”

“... after Marriage, a farce written by John Gay, with the assistance of John Arbuthnot and the young Alexander Pope, which was performed at Drury Lane in 1717. The leading character, Dr Fossile, has just married a much younger woman (‘the best of my curiosities’) and is unaware that two would-be seducers have moved into his domestic ...”