“... feeds a suspicion – and fed one for Huizinga’s contemporary critics, his countryman Peter Geyl foremost among them – that Huizinga saw ‘autumn’ in his sources because he had a pessimistic cast of mind. It was surely that same, slightly aloof sense that civilisation was crumbling which led him to focus his researches mainly on the ...”

“... of Austerlitz on his reputation, but set over Barclay’s head as supreme commander (after Tsar Alexander) as the crisis of the 1812 campaign was reached after the abandonment of Smolensk. Of course, Kutusov’s reputation with posterity owes much to Tolstoy’s portrait in War and Peace, where the drunken old womaniser is depicted as a Russian ...”

“... to determine which is the better book. Richard Burton was printed by Butler and Tanner Limited, Peter Sellers by the Fakenham Press, and since the one establishment is in Somerset and the other in Norfolk, it is fair to absolve both of them from the sort of catchpenny opportunist hustling which these days has the publishing world of London by the ...”

“... the Turkish sack of Constantinople and the rise of Protestantism. He had predicted the reign of Peter the Great and Frederick the Great. Tantalisingly for Greeks in the 1750s, he also offered a vision of what awaited their descendants: an ‘era of destruction of the Mohammedans’ and the resurrection of an Orthodox empire with the help of the ‘kings of ...”

“... of the Fifties) Donald Davie, who kept the subject respectable, the interest alive. Michael Alexander suggests that ‘indifference and bafflement are today more common than hostility,’ and that may be so. But there has been some excellent work done on Pound recently: Richard Sieburth’s Instigations, Leon Surette’s A Light from Eleusis, and now ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the attention of state censors, so it was safer to make ‘half-joking’ statements. In 1712, Peter Friedrich Arpe, a scholar from Kiel, tried to exonerate the Italian radical writer Giulio Cesare Vanini, who had been executed in 1619 for atheism and blasphemy. By writing about atheism, Arpe might appear to be justifying it. His apologia for Vanini ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... its support for the market in the NHS and get behind the bill. The shadow health minister, Heidi Alexander, is still finding her feet, but the signs are not good. Unlike McDonnell, she has not brought in new political advisers. She is being advised by those who advised Andy Burnham, and judging from a meeting I had with her very recently New Labour thinking ...”

“... more validly levelled against the naively literal conception of the Great Chain which we find in Alexander Pope and which appears in a passage cited by Nisbet from Arthur Lovejoy: Vast chain of being; which from God began, Natures aetherial, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see, No glass can reach, from Infinite to thee ...”

“... As he lay dying​ Alexander Litvinenko solved his own murder and foresaw the future. A professional detective on his last case, with himself as the victim, he worked out that he had been poisoned in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair, by another former KGB detective, Andrei Lugovoi. He had thought they were partners, investigating the connections between Putin’s Kremlin, organised crime and money laundering in Europe but, he now realised, Lugovoi was still taking orders from the people they were investigating ...”

“... years or decades. They include Anna Akhmatova’s Rekviem (written during and about the Purges), Alexander Tvardovsky’s long-suppressed By Right of Memory, dealing with collectivisation, Anatoly Zhigulin’s cycle of poems about his time in Stalinist prisons and camps, poems by long ignored émigrés or opponents such as Nikolai Gumilyev, Georgy ...”

“... In summer​ 1876, Peter Kropotkin was given a pocket watch by a visiting relative. He was 33 years old, bore one of the Russian Empire’s oldest princely titles and had been a page de chambre to Tsar Alexander II. He was already famous in Russia for his scientific work on zoology and glaciation ...”

“... Their two younger sons deservedly get chapters to themselves in The Macmillans. Mr Daniel and Mr Alexander were the founders of the family firm. They made their way to London via Cambridge, that bookish city, and into publishing via bookselling. At the age of 20, Daniel was diagnosed as a victim of tuberculosis, which Victorians knew well enough as graveyard ...”

“... Eighteen months later, the Scythians were in Paris, but in a surprising new guise. Tsar Alexander I arrived on the last day of March 1814 at the head of an army of half a million troops from Russia, Britain, Sweden, the Habsburg Empire and the German principalities. No fires were started. Alexander had come, he ...”