“... Corps came across an Afghan man who had been wounded in a helicopter strike. The patrol leader, Alexander Blackman, executed him, admitting unabashedly that he was violating the Geneva Conventions. He didn’t realise that one of his men was wearing a helmet camera. The execution was treated as an outrage even within the army: Blackman was arrested and ...”

“... with cultural ambitions. Napoleon let no one forget that he was following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great. A Commission on Sciences and Arts accompanied his troops: a corps of 151 savants, few of them out of their twenties. There were surveyors, engineers, mathematicians, printers, shipbuilders, architects, physicists, mineralogists, medics, a few ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I fear only France.’ He believed he had secured an agreement with the prime minister, Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen, his foreign secretary; they thought there had been merely a friendly discussion. All this was the background to the Crimean War of 1853-55, the subject of Orlando Figes’s admirable book. The war was at once the most dramatic ...”

“... Winter’s Tale dramatises a prose romance from 1588, Pandosto, appropriately written by the same Robert Greene who accused Shakespeare of being a plagiaristic ‘upstart crow’, while both The Tempest and Cymbeline borrow from Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, a creaky anonymous play of the early 1580s about an exiled courtier who lives in a cave and ...”

“... treatment of the only other men up for a capital offence that day, Thomas White and Alexander Lawson, who were charged with stealing cigars from William Tucker’s shop in Lambeth. Wedgwood decided to discharge them of the felony and instead imprison them for two months with hard labour for the misdemeanour of being found in a shop with an ...”

“... Delphic Oracle instructed those who consulted it; Polonius told Laertes to be true to himself; and Alexander Pope said that self-knowledge was ‘the proper study of mankind’. It’s a common counsel, but there is a tension in it. Knowing yourself is supposed to be substantially within your own competence, but the injunction to do it comes from an ...”

“... in twenty years of anti-Albanian repression at the hands of Tito’s Minister of the Interior, Alexander Rankovc. Tito’s 1974 Constitution defined Kosovo as an ‘autonomous province’ and improved conditions for Albanians, who used it to create new institutions and improve education. Many Serbs, however, began to see the Constitution as an attempt to ...”

“... His birth certificate, which Mantle hasn’t bothered to examine, shows that his father, William Robert Archer, lived at 48 Highbury Grove, then a North London boarding-house owed by one Mrs Rhoda Bowness. His occupation is given as ‘journalist’. The mother, Lola Howard Archer, lived separately over the Thames at a now-vanished address in Southwark ...”

“... speak’. At 15, Callow comments, the boy’s manner resembled that of ‘an old buffer ... an Alexander Woollcott’, and Thomson notes that throughout his life ‘he adored and worshipped old age.’ Welles’s forced maturity was the work of both parents, from whom he learned to think of childhood as a form of illness or deficiency, a ‘pestilential ...”

“... today. Enough material there for a whole case-history. Notwithstanding the title of Paul Alexander Juutilainen’s recent film docubiog about Marcuse, Herbert the Hippopotamus, the slack-sphinctered pachyderm in LaRouche’s first sentence refers not to Marcuse, late consort of Korsch, Davis and the Weathermen, nor even to Lyndon Jr’s own ...”

“... life of someone they are liable to end up disliking intensely. Lawrence Thompson was selected by Robert Frost to be his official biographer: after literally living with his subject, the biographer found the poet to be very far from admirable; and the work he produced bore clear evidence of this shift in sentiment. I spent more years than I like to recall ...”

“... film Germany in Autumn was made, with contributions from, among others, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz and Volker Schlondorff, working together with Heinrich Böll. The Schlondorff-Böll episode showed a panel of TV programmers rejecting a production of Sophocles’ Antigone because it showed Antigone’s suicide after Creon refused to ...”

“... the degree of gravity that Presidential misdeeds must reach before they become impeachable. But Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist Papers, suggested that impeachable offences must always involve ‘the abuse or violation of some public trust’ and result in ‘injuries done immediately to the society itself’. So how could the impeachniks justify ...”

“... Russia had been reconstituted from the ruins of the Soviet Union, the Russian Vice-President, Alexander Rutskoi, wrote in tones of patriotic despair about the queues for Moscow’s first McDonald’s, on Pushkin Square: the death of his country’s culture was taking place in the square named after its most famous poet. That people, not all of them ...”