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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... men, most of them clothed in traditional sharwal khameez and jaunty turbans. ‘Now and then,’ Robert Byron wrote in 1933, ‘a calico beehive with a window at the top flits across the scene. This is a woman.’ Contemporary Kabul is closer to Byron’s description than to a 1977 guidebook’s city of ‘mini-skirted schoolgirls’. The schoolgirls are now ...”

“... People’s Party – had been on the staff of Army Group E in Greece, commanded by General Alexander Löhr, himself executed by the Yugoslavs for war crimes in 1947. Personal smear campaigns are not in the tradition of Austrian politics. Also, the Socialists knew perfectly well that stirring the pot of Austria’s murky Nazi past was unlikely to ...”

“... recall, he was full of exhortations about art and entertainment and stories about his best friend, Robert Redford, who had starred in his latest film. His second home, he told me, was in Utah, near Redford’s. He got there by aeroplane, his own, of course, which he also piloted. ‘I’m confident we’re going to have something good,’ he said at the end of ...”

“... the spark. And there is a new roll of honour containing those – Hélène Carrière d’Encausse, Robert Conquest, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Pipes – who did see the fuse peeping out from the foundations and said as much. Indeed, a whole issue (Spring 1993) of the conservative US journal National Interest was largely devoted to a celebration of the ...”

“... for which society cannot find a use. In 1829, an Oxford-trained barrister called Sir William Robert Grove found a new way of making electricity: he trickled oxygen and hydrogen gases over a pair of electrodes and produced three things. One was heat. The second was water. The third was electricity. There were no moving parts to the instrument, and no ...”

“... because it presented ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’ (to quote Alexander Pope)? Or was it, perish the thought, a ‘quotation’ for the simple reason that it had appeared in earlier books of quotations, and so could be ripped off by buccaneers like Bartlett?The preface to the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary in 1979 ...”

“... of a famous “academic career”’ and for a while could find nothing else. He was rescued by Alexander Gerschenkron, an émigré from Russia who had met him at Berkeley, been impressed by his expertise and command of languages, and asked if he’d like to take charge of research on Western Europe for the Federal Reserve. This was perfect. He and Sarah ...”