“... starring Bill Murray, which took the piss out of the repetitious and the banal by capturing the star in a time-warp where he was doomed to enact the same day over and over again until he could learn to act his way out of it. Other smart films have been made on dumb subjects, or about apparently dumb people. Rain Man was a masterly study of the idiot ...”

“... remains sedimented in the popular imagination: even the most hardcore sceptic knows their star sign, and recently, it has enjoyed a resurgence among millennials, especially in the United States.Astrology has a claim to be called the first great science. Unlike many other disciplines of antiquity, it dealt in repeatable, quantifiable data ...”

“... revolt, was commander of the Corps des Pages for twenty-five years, and presided late in life over Alexander II’s Council of Ministers; his grandfather, Count Nicholas, described by Lord Salisbury as ‘an amusing, joking man without regard for the truth’, negotiated the treaty which concluded the Russo-Turkish War and, as ...”

“... on a large international audience. (Byron was a prototype for the scandalous poet as literary star but lived before the telegraph and mass-circulation newspaper.) Already in 1879, at the age of 16, he had sent the newspapers a false report of his own death in order to publicise his first book of poems: Gabriele D’Annunzio, the young poet, already well ...”

“... the juicy detail that Orwell’s widow, Sonia, was wooed with the promise of meeting her favourite star, Clark Gable – but, as detailed by Daniel Leab in Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of ‘Animal Farm’ (Pennsylvania, $55), the operation was real. Leab is a historian who has done extensive research into the production of Hollywood’s Cold War ...”

“... say? This is why it might not be insane to give some credence to the suggestion made in passing by Alexander Humez and Nicholas Humez in On the Dot: The Speck that Changed the World (Oxford, £13.99), an excellent history of another underexamined typographical mark, that Tomlinson – though employed by the US Department of Defense at the time, and on the ...”

“... and were giving it to us. They’d made us Masters of the Universe, and it felt, as in the time of Alexander, that what they’d created would last for ever. It didn’t though, did it? Don’t get me started. Four decades later, I think we all agree that a domestic apocalypse is under way, and that American manhood is under siege. How do you think that’s ...”

“... husband were nearing their conclusion. To his biography of that beautiful and damned creature Alexander Walker brings knowledge, sympathy and tact in equal measure: Vivien is the best account we could possibly expect while key figures in the drama are still living. He is especially good on the early life and convent schooldays, and his chronicle of her ...”

“... Republican budget-busting efforts to swell defence spending and revive the multi-billion dollar Star Wars fantasy (the scheme is science fiction but the profits are real), Clinton has abandoned all talk of a peace dividend. It requires only a slight turn of the kaleidoscope, therefore, to acquire a second perspective, one that turns the defeat of the ...”

“... who ‘travelled the world to gratify his stomach and appetites even lower’. By the time of Alexander the Great the canon had more or less solidified, the bedrock of what was then, and would remain, ‘a classical education’. With Alexander’s conquests Greek emigrants gained possession of the whole Near East. The ...”

“... describes his mood at that time as stemming from ‘injured professionalism’. His exchanges with Alexander – given here – were petty and pettish. There is little attempt at military analysis in this work, but both in Sicily and Italy many readers will regard Hamilton as remarkably generous to Monty, and unjust to his critics. The last parts of this book ...”

“... three of the four people who have had information about themselves embargoed: Princess Ashraf, Alexander Haig and Richard (‘Dick’) Helms. Manifestly evasive though the diaries are, they are nonetheless exceptionally illuminating on two issues: on the last years of the Shah’s regime, seen from the inside; and on how to try to nobble Britain’s media ...”

“... is obvious, and perhaps inevitable as Russia joins the international cultural circuit. That its star figures should be trying, by every means, to get rich is also inevitable: they have after all long been envious guests on their foreign colleagues’ estates and in their palatial apartments. Lacking the old means of coercion over its artists, Russian ...”

“... about Rudolf’s character (‘a kind, honest and loving son’), as had his ballet master, Alexander Pushkin, and Pushkin’s wife, Xenia: Rudik’s act of treachery had not been premeditated; he never talked politics and was not a dissident of any kind. A character report noted, moreover, that there had been no signs of immoral behaviour before his ...”

“... file, I read Pavel Voshchanov – once Yeltsin’s press secretary, now Komsomolskaya Pravda’s star commentator – in his column of 31 January: ‘the Communists do not really want to be in power because they would have to take responsibility for all that happens – and if they fail, it would be their second exit from power, this time for a long ...”