“... 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 ...”

“... European allies as a man who had the root of the matter in him. As a diplomatist and a four-star general, he counted as an expert in the fields of foreign policy and security in an Administration that was much lacking in those branches of expertise. The new President reputedly had everything to learn about international affairs, a strong disposition to ...”

“... lowering of the spirits on seeing that it has been thought necessary to gloss references to Lenin, Alexander the Great, the Archangel Gabriel, Plato and Nirvana. It might be added that line-numbers (in fives) are given in the margins throughout the texts: an ugly and unnecessary mode of typographical embalming. As for the Revelation, the last book of the ...”

“... She was a wonder, a legend. The writer Alexander Kinglake said that when he was a child in the 1820s Lady Hester Stanhope’s name was as well known to him as Robinson Crusoe’s, though he thought Crusoe was more believable. A century later, her table-talk (retailed in six volumes by her doctor-companion, Charles Meryon, and first published in 1845-46) was still being studied for the School Certificate ...”

“... to mean something. So perhaps the comparison is not appropriate. An interesting case is the name Alexander. It looks very much as if it is a typically Greek dithematic compound of alex (‘defend’) and andr (‘man’). In the Iliad it is an alternative name for Paris, prince of Troy. There was therefore some excitement in the 1920s when a long Hittite ...”

“... nothing higher than one of her uncle Philips’ clerks, and was content to be considered a star in the society of Meriton; that the ‘considerable sum’ Mrs Norris gave William Price was one pound; that Mr Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage, and kept her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years; and that the letters placed ...”

“... In​ the Beat constellation, Allen Ginsberg’s star now shines more brightly than the rest. True, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs glowed on in the aftermath of On the Road (1957) and Naked Lunch (1959); Brion Gysin, inventor of the cut-up technique, is still visible on a clear night. But the beautiful Lucien Carr, an Alain Delon lookalike drawn into the Beat circle by a smitten scoutmaster who stalked him across America until Carr pulled out a knife and killed him in New York, no longer emits much light ...”

“... which their favourite movies were shot (not just Roman ‘re-con’ – some classic sequences of Star Wars were filmed here and have generated their own tourist trail round the desert locations). Film crews and actors usefully fill hotel beds during the off-season. It is not an entirely new initiative. As early as 1896, when the country was still under ...”

“... mutilate the nose of the Great Sphinx because he thought it looked too ‘African’? Is the star Sirius B a storehouse of energy and information transmitted specifically to people whose bodies are rich in melanin? Are Christmas trees, chocolate bars, baseballs, Spanish bulls (and what’s done to them by way of chopping, biting, thwacking and ...”

“... Vogue already had her pegged in 1915 as ‘treacle-sweet of tongue but vinegar witted’, it was Alexander Woollcott who created the brand, describing ‘Our Mrs Parker’ in a 1933 Cosmopolitan profile as ‘a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth’. Other friends and frenemies riffed on the theme. Corey Ford opted for animal imagery: Parker was ‘a ...”

“... The OED suggests that the word ‘star’ was not used of ‘a person of brilliant reputation or talents’ until the 19th century. Nonetheless Sir Walter Ralegh (1554-1618) struck his contemporaries as pretty much a ‘star’ in this sense. The attorney general said during his final trial: ‘He hath been as a star at which the world hath gazed; but stars may fall, nay they must fall when they trouble the sphere wherein they abide ...”

“... what remained was tourism. In 2008, parliament passed a law declaring the construction of five-star hotels to be in the ‘national interest’, as part of an effort to triple tourism’s contribution to GDP to 60 per cent by 2017 (it’s currently around 25 per cent).There’s no better place to behold Montenegro’s disfigurement over the last two ...”

“... MacDiarmid’s verse) is designed to be controversial. It should be set beside the recent work of Alexander Broadie, to whose explorations of The Circle of John Mair: Logic and Logicians in Pre-Reformation Scotland Davie makes reference. The last section of The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect is entitled ‘Back to John Mair?’, Davie is trying to extend ...”

“... and parliamentarian Alexis de Tocqueville and the socialists Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Alexander Herzen – into the revolution, link arms with them as they pass through its euphoria, confusion and violence, and track their steps as they re-emerge into the post-revolutionary world.It’s an approach that might be made to work for many modern ...”

“... start – there’s no strategising for that. Whites must realise they are no longer the rising star and that the rising star is the black man now.’ I asked Precious if anyone had put him on their board of directors. ‘Not yet,’ he said, somewhat sourly, ‘but it will happen. Definitely.’ He spoke of his contacts ...”