“... 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 ...”

“... Princess Victoria. His father, grandson of the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt and son of Prince Alexander of Battenberg, had joined the British Navy in 1868: a chequered career which saw him become First Sea Lord in 1912 but fall to English bigotry shortly after the outbreak of war, when he was forced to resign. The war did not, as expected, end by ...”

“... cuisine. Maybe he should reconsider. Imagine a minister of local culture who is also a national star of revivalist Russian cinema. Depardieu has already tested the water. In Salzburg in 2010 he took the role of narrator in a performance of Prokofiev’s oratorio Ivan Grozny (Op. 116), arranged by Abram Stasevich and based on Eisenstein’s texts for the ...”

“... the less clear things become. Take the meeting of Stash and Francesca. Mrs Krantz defines Prince Alexander Vassilivitch Valensky, alias Stash, as ‘the great war hero and incomparable polo-player’. Stash is Daisy’s father. Francesca Vernon, the film star, is her mother. Francesca possesses ‘a combination of ...”

“... of an apartment in central Paris once occupied by Michèle Morgan (born Simone Renée Roussel), star of Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des brumes, the acme of 1930s poetic realism. The evidence presented comes, with a single exception, from a roll-call of the most celebrated divas of 20th-century French cinema: Danielle Darrieux, Simone Signoret, Anouk ...”

“... imaging, gas chromatography and various sorts of microscopy. In 1874, when the collection of Alexander Barker, the son of a fashionable boot-maker, came up for sale at Christie’s, the National Gallery acquired two Botticellis: both long pictures of Venus, one with three putti (An Allegory), the other with four baby satyrs and Mars (Venus and Mars). An ...”

“... Godwin’s cosmonaut, Gonsales, in many ways had an easy time of it. He could point at a swan or a star and the Lunars would whistle one tune or another. Tune by tune Gonsales pieced together his Lunar vocabulary. But almost the only thing we know for certain about aliens is that they don’t live close enough to see us pointing. We know of a handful of ...”

“... I wanted to be until I became that person. Or he became me.’ In 1937, Frances Farmer, his co-star in The Toast of New York, found him ‘an aloof, remote person, intent on being Cary Grant playing Cary Grant’. By the time ‘Cary Grant’ was fully formed, the man had to give in to his creation: ‘Everybody wants to be Cary Grant,’ Grant ...”

“... reign to rethink the seismic dynastic shift. And as a reminder of James’s kingly experience, Alexander Courtney’s James VI, Britannic Prince concentrated on his 36-year reign as king of Scotland, before he succeeded Elizabeth; a second volume taking up the story from 1603 is promised. Meanwhile, Gareth Russell’s Queen James is an intimate biography ...”

“... men who once worked as juniors in his office, having been hand-picked at a very young age. Douglas Alexander became Brown’s researcher and speechwriter when he was in his early twenties. So did Ed Miliband. Ed Balls joined Brown when he was only 27, after a spell at the Financial Times, and they have been joined at the hip ever since. Despite the fact that ...”

“... something between 5 and 10 per cent. The Derzhava (Power) Party of former vice-president General Alexander Rutskoi, and Vlast Narodu (Power to the People), a party recently formed by Nikolai Ryzhkov, the former Soviet prime minister, may also get about 5 per cent. The Agrarian Party and Women of Russia tend to vote with the Communists. If the rule which ...”

“... which is based on that radio programme, and stars Keira Knightley as the feminist historian Sally Alexander. It’s positioned – as Pride (2014) was to Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners in the 1980s, and Made in Dagenham (2010) was to the Ford sewing machinists’ strike of 1968 – to allow viewers some minutes of unchallenging celebration that ...”

“... demonstrates, her work doesn’t answer Freud’s riddle: instead it cuts right through it, as Alexander did the Gordian knot. Höch, granted, was an artist, not a conqueror, and her scissors required more precision than force. Or perhaps we should say that the force of her cutting was metaphorical rather than physical, as it had to be if the task was to ...”

“... and its works, all you need to know is that it has just three honorary fellows: Friedrich Hayek, Alexander Solzhenitsyn – and Ronald Reagan. The present volume, in other words, would make soothing bedside reading for Mrs Margaret Thatcher, not least because its opening contribution comes from her favourite TV star and ...”

“... and she ends wretchedly. Legend has cast her as a Great Lover or seductress-extraordinary (Alexander Korda’s 1941 film-biography, which Winston Churchill is reported to have seen over a hundred times, is titled, distressingly, That Hamilton Woman), but there are elements of low comedy in her story: she became stupendously fat even before she met ...”