“... of the Clifford assignment. Fanny, being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, is a quaint and belated substitute for the Columbia doctorate on 18th-century literature which Ms Jong abandoned in the mid-1960s. There is clearly a market for this kind of thing. ‘Another Lady’ and yet another personage have presumably made ...”

“... killed them all; another ugly tale about Caracalla is that he dug up, not far away, the grave of Alexander the Great (whom he much admired), found the body in good condition and broke off Alexander’s nose as a souvenir. It happens that I have written a play about Caracalla’s behaviour in North Britain, so I decided ...”

“... trying to exploit the chaos, out of power. But rather than protecting people from violence, Reece Jones argues in Violent Borders, such policies are in fact a cause of it. The central problem, as he sees it, is that in an age when barriers – to the movement of goods, capital, communication etc – have been coming down, the physical defences between states ...”

“... mere hysterical wisps alongside the sunny central story, masterfully controlled, of the delightful Jones and Iqbal families. The Autograph Man is, as it were, a novel made entirely of those wisps. Its central character, Alex-Li Tandem, is a dreary blank, an empty centre entirely filled by his pop-culture devotions. Around him swirls a text incapable of ever ...”

“... King Alexander ​ of Yugoslavia was assassinated in Marseille on 9 October 1934, alongside Louis Barthou, the French foreign minister. When the news reached Dubrovnik, the bells rang ‘all morning long’ according to a ten-year-old American girl staying in the city. ‘Everybody spoke in an undertone except the roosters and my brother ...”

“... offers the poet and thinker. It is a representation that has more in common with the head of Alexander the Great on a coin, with Queen Elizabeth in any number of portraits, or Queen Victoria in the statues that stand on plinths in squares and parks all over her erstwhile empire than with a portrait like Sargent’s of Henry James, which encourages you to ...”

“... They have no support from the state.’ Since the crown passed from the exiled Russian aristocrat, Alexander Alekhine, in 1946, only the iconic Bobby Fischer has wrested it from Russia. Chess is now practised by ominously boring people (like me) who recall classic encounters from centuries ago (Russell’s favourite is the so-called Pearl of Wijk aan Zee, a ...”

“... and surly and spiteful’, and an eater of prunes because of ‘bowel worries’) from a review Alexander Theroux wrote of My Other Life. In Mother Land the casus belli is Jay’s telling their mother but not Floyd of his liaison with Melissa. In life it was perhaps the unflattering portrait of Anthony Burgess in My Other Life that riled ...”

“... King Wenceslas’ (by J.M. Neale), followed by ‘Once in royal David’s city’ (Mrs Alexander); ‘All things bright and beautiful’ (also Mrs Alexander) is less familiar than it used to be, but was once possibly the best known of all. The most famous American poem of the Victorian age is ‘Away in a ...”

“... was treated as a document of its own time only after the appearance of the first volume of Sir Alexander Grant’s commentary in 1857. Turner interestingly remarks that Grant’s questionable treatment of the concept of energeia seems to have influenced Pater, notably in the famous declaration that success in life involves burning with a hard, gemlike ...”

“... He is fighting Bolsheviks in a world of confused categories – for we remember that young Colonel Alexander, later Lord Alexander of Tunis, was out there too, commanding 6000 men of the German Landeswehr. Yet hard Erick has something in common with soft Alexis, besides their almost stateless tribalism – for Alexis is a ...”

“... of so long a contact with the hard surface,’ the analyst Richard Sterba recalled. In 1926 Ernest Jones set up a clinic on two floors of a town house in West London, with funding from an American industrialist, and Ferenczi initiated another a few years later in Budapest. ‘Eventually,’ Danto writes, ‘other psychoanalytic societies followed with ...”

“... of his exotic cast, to leaven the lump of company accounts, technology and policy. Sir Roderick Jones, head and dominant owner of Reuters in the Twenties and Thirties, was a snob. He liked to employ Etonians, partly, to do him justice, because Reuters men were supposed to be able to mix easily with diplomats and foreign ministers. In 1933 the Etonian Ian ...”

“... In 2011, the Greens took minority control of Brighton and Hove City Council, and in 2013 Jenny Jones, who has represented the Greens in the London Assembly since 2000, became a peer in the House of Lords. At the beginning of 2014, the party had 15,000 members; now the figure is closer to 60,000 (Ukip and the Lib Dems have about 45,000 each); most of the ...”

“... but Insane’ was Ian Gilmour’s heading for his Spectator review of Michael Foot and Mervyn Jones, whose Suez book Guilty Men 1956 is still one of the best accounts of the collusion. The Spectator has often made trouble for the Tory leadership, with Iain Macleod’s bean-spiller on ‘The Magic Circle’ being the benchmark example until recently. Since ...”