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“... 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 ...”

“... Englishman’. His chief rival in Amazonia was a publicity-hungry American millionaire, Dr Alexander Hamilton Rice, whose state of the art radio had an aerial the size of a hang-glider. When Rice turned back after a hostile encounter with the Yanomami, Fawcett reported in characteristically clipped style that he had ‘skedaddled’ because he was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... particular intensity such conflicts assumed amid the democratic ethos of Jacksonian America, but Alexander Welsh has advanced a related argument about Dickens, another 19th-century male writer deeply implicated in a narrative of the artist’s self-making. What might once have looked like both novelists’ participation in universally Oedipal themes has ...”

“... the statements of the three friends she denounced as terrorists, Joseph Mooney, Brendan Magill and Alexander Rowntree. In long interviews, all three men had convinced the police that they had no connection at all with any terrorist organisation or any bombing. Yet at the trial their Irish names were left dangling in the air. To the jury they were ...”

“... of natural law over all human law, and for that reason his many American readers – including Alexander Hamilton – took him to be a supporter of resistance, upholding the ‘inherent (though latent) powers of society, which no climate, not time, no constitution, no contract, can ever destroy or diminish’. Even Edmund Burke thought that Blackstone had ...”

“... a distinguished collection of essays on one Stuart minister who advanced British hegemony – Peter Lake urges historians not to link Early Modern crises ‘directly to contemporary concerns about Northern Ireland, the union with Scotland and the European union’. It strikes me that Lake devalues the past, though, when he plays down its connections with ...”

“... clears him of Count Tolstoy’s accusation that he was part of some conspiracy to deceive General Alexander and others. The only people who were deceived were the poor wretches who were handed over, and even a Peter Wright would have difficulty in seeing Harold Macmillan as a tool of the KGB. Mr Horne thinks ‘it is easy ...”

“... rejected by impercipient academics, who preferred a Chair of Medicine, the impact in Scotland of Peter Ramus’s Paris-based assault on Rhetoric helped prise open a chink through which literary criticism could eventually squeeze. Bernard Lamy’s L’Art de parler(1675, translated 1676) signals an important transitional stage in the process, for by the time ...”

“... foe, and ran the drama happily through in his mind. A few weeks later the newsreels showed King Alexander of Yugoslavia being mown down by a Croatian assassin on exactly that spot. ‘I felt oddly guilty, but also pleased. In the Mediterranean sunshine there were strange and violent men with whom I could identify, and with whom, in a way, I was now in ...”