“... a UN colleague told her. ‘You have the courage of your connections!’) Marriage – to Michael Aris, a scholar of Tibet and a friend of the Gore-Booths – deferred but did not dispel this sense of unfulfilled destiny, which was evident in letters written during their courtship. I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help ...”

“... that it succeeded at Lenin’s expense, a triumphant negation of Lenin’s success. Back in 1984, Michael Scammell wrote a fine warts-and-all biography of Solzhenitsyn which was forced to end on a note of uncertainty. Had Solzhenitsyn blown his great international success of the 1970s by retreating into angry exile in Vermont to write a multi-volume epic of ...”

“... of doom creeping towards them. In his essay on Tolstoy’s image during the Russian revolution, Michael Denner points out that in 1917 – seven years after he died – the New York Times blamed Tolstoy’s pacifism for the collapse of the Russian front in Galicia. Nobody knew who the Bolsheviks were; everyone knew Tolstoy. Many foreign commentators ...”

“... Confucianism was ‘transformed into a state ideology’. If we think of Aristotle, the tutor to Alexander, rather than Socrates, say, or Augustine, we have an idea of the way the Confucians situated themselves. Scholars with practical advice to offer could change policy, if they were lucky enough not to be purged, but only at the cost of their intellectual ...”

“... not to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms of a growing pie.’ That is why they become rich. And ...”

“... in 2005 to act as trustee, with directorships given to two royal family officials (Alan Reid and Michael Stevens) and, most recently, the duke of Buccleuch, Scotland’s second largest private landowner. The Balmoral estate has been valued at £80 million – assets include the 167-room castle, 81 residential properties, commercial forestry plantations, a ...”

“... line to Putin … he would not be making a regular spectacle of himself,’ the military analyst Michael Kofman, recently returned from Bakhmut, said in a podcast. ‘The reason he’s doing it is because he’s very desperate and he’s trying to get Putin’s attention by speaking to him this way, the way I would say some years ago I used to see people on ...”

“... also oriented us when we were lost. A small image has remained with me: debris over the grave of Alexander Hamilton, the great champion of New York, in the old cemetery of Trinity Church near the WTC. While Thomas Jefferson waxed pastoral about an agrarian America, Hamilton insisted on the cosmopolitanism of the city as the wellspring of the nation. To see ...”

“... writer’, and he cut some contributions by more than half. One enemy he certainly made was Alexander Balloch Grosart DD, who was invited to contribute several entries for the first volumes, principally on 17th-century divines. As early as October 1883, Stephen was complaining that he had ‘had my usual letter of abuse from that old fool ...”

“... level of translation is high). There are also whole poets new to me, like the 16th-century Scot Alexander Hume, who can achieve a small intense uncanny radiance: The ample heaven of fabrik sure In cleannes dois surpas The crystal and the silver pure Or clearest poleist glas. The same so tranquill is and still That na where sail ye find Saif on ane high ...”

“... by Trump to urinate on the bed Obama had used on a visit to Moscow; that Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen had travelled to Prague for secret briefings with Kremlin officials and hackers; that another Trump staffer had discussed sanctions relief at a meeting with Igor Sechin, the head of Russia’s state-owned oil company, Rosneft; or that Trump had ...”

“... different from the big-lunged belt of her talent show days: whimpering and coquettish, with a Michael Jackson hiccup. On ‘Baby One More Time’ it was paired with a jarring three-note riff and an instantly famous video shot in a high school, resetting the pop clocks with a controlled explosion of scrunchies, crop tops and love hearts. For a moment in ...”

“... possibilities for a negotiated peace. President Belaunde Terry of Peru, with some help from Alexander Haig, had advanced his proposal that both sides should withdraw (the British landings had not yet taken place), that a third party should temporarily administer the islands, and that a settlement should be reached within a fixed time-limit. The matter ...”

“... the help of a book like Gareth Peter’s My Daddies!, Mel Elliot’s The Girl with Two Dads or Michael Joosten’s My Two Dads and Me – never mind that they’re intended for a younger age group. Time to consolidate their sense of themselves. Instead he reads to them about the early life of the Buddha. Better that they should learn detachment than be ...”

“... was a junior engineer for the Army Signal Corps and married to Ethel.In 1999, Julius’s handler, Alexander Feklisov, published his memoirs over the objections of the Russian intelligence service. He was a decorated Hero of the Russian Federation, credited in Moscow with having helped resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis: he figured they’d let him get away with ...”