“... also a good deal of repetition. We are reminded four times of Blake’s maxim, almost as often of Robert Burton’s admittedly splendid description of tears as ‘excrementitious humours of the third concoction’. But Dixon’s instinct for connections and comparisons is unfailingly sharp and illuminating. He ranges effortlessly from Margery Kempe ...”

“... microscopic living creatures – that lived in liquids, including drinking water. Alexander Cruikshank Houston, a bacteriologist, began his career by studying the infusoria that could be used in ‘bacteria beds’, a standard treatment for removing organic solids from wastewater (bacteria munch it away) still in use today in older treatment ...”

“... of his ilk. It is scant consolation that the Founding Fathers saw him coming. In the Federalist, Alexander Hamilton noted that ‘of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.’ That’s the reason Article Two of ...”

“... popular text was the Secretum secretorum, supposedly Aristotle’s teachings as passed directly to Alexander the Great, translated from Arabic into Latin. Another canonical text after 1300 was De anima by pseudo-Avicenna, which argued that the three basic ingredients in alchemy were human blood, hair and birds’ eggs. Students of such works were zealous ...”

“... Henry II, fancying a saint in the family, bought Edward’s canonisation from the schismatic Pope Alexander III in 1161 in return for some very welcome support. Henry III rebuilt the abbey in 1245 as a shrine to St Edward – and a royal mausoleum to himself, almost bankrupting the Crown in the process. The abbey’s own website calls him ‘recklessly ...”

“... postwar repression and deportation. He took personal credit for the expulsion of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, adding (in what was then perhaps only a tic rather than a full-fledged disorder) that Emma Goldman’s private love-letters made ‘spicy reading’. Always there was the connection – sometimes latent and sometimes blatant – between the ...”

“... only as ‘tragic warnings’. For the use of a character as a model, it would be hard to beat Alexander’s deliberate and well-documented modelling of himself on Achilles. For Alexander, the epic was sufficient to ‘trigger desire and excite identification’ in the manner Warner attributes only to modern ...”

“... All that seems clear is that it was someone who admired Gilbert Elliot of Minto and was annoyed by Robert Dundas of Arniston, second Lord President. Quite a lot of Scottish writers on politics might fulfil these requirements. The militia was attractive to upper-class society because of the opportunities it gave for the exertion of patronage, to the ...”

“... 14th century; the Van Eycks had forebears and colleagues involved in this production line, such as Robert Campin, who also embraced oil paint. Captivated by pictorial exports from Siena, Flemings were now keen to commission works that stood halfway between the public arrays of stone-carved saints and the little pictures in books meant for private enjoyment ...”

“... who ‘gave no more thought to the unbearable burdens of the Russian peasant’ than the Czar Alexander, is, like most statesmen, treated with contempt, unlike Chekhov, who remarked that if the upper classes could depute their bowel movements to the working classes they would do so, explaining that the best people should not waste on these merely ...”

“... tried to suppress the book and to buy up copies from bookshops. It’s almost a relief to turn to Robert Vansittart, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office until his vehement opposition to appeasement led Chamberlain to kick him upstairs to the House of Lords, who proposed a different enemy: Prussia and Prussianism. He told Lord Halifax that the war ...”

“... enough.Michael Powell first met Emeric Pressburger in 1939, at a script meeting organised by Alexander Korda, the dominant figure in British film during the 1930s and 1940s. Powell had been hired to direct Korda’s fantasy epic The Thief of Bagdad, released in 1940; Pressburger had been a screenwriter at Berlin’s UFA studios until 1933, when Jews were ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... arms deals, the drug-smuggling operations, and the still unconfirmed CIA activities described by Robert Woodward in Veil. While fully agreeing with many of her views, I think Didion is slightly naive, as if the Cuban exiles of Miami were the only such group with émigré interests at work in the US Government and its entrepreneurial adjuncts. Think of the ...”

“... a few of his New Yorker contributors would be ex-colleagues on the Stars and Stripes: most notably Alexander Woolcott, with whom he would enjoy a career-long love-hate association. When Woolcott joined the Stars and Stripes, Ross asked him what he had done in civvy street. Woolcott told him that he had been drama critic on the New York Times. At this, Ross ...”