“... not create literature. Moby-Dick already existed by the time the reviewers came down on it. Like Alexander the Great blocking the sunlight while standing next to Diogenes in his tub, reviewing can only hinder what it has not made. I suspect that May knows this, if only because his book is a melancholy record of lost opportunities: The Rainbow and The Good ...”

“... theme, the precariousness of rationality. The evenly matched subjects of Measuring the World are Alexander von Humboldt, born 1769, geographer, naturalist and explorer, notably of Latin America, and Carl Friedrich Gauss, born 1777, hardly less prodigious as a mathematician and inventor. At first the structure of the book, with chapters describing their ...”

“... of this realisation came his interest in such non-cowardly homosexuals as T.E. Lawrence (Ross) and Alexander the Great (Adventure Story). But perhaps the question to be asked is: why should a heterosexual writer adopt a gay point of view? What’s the benefit, not to the person, but to the novel? There needs to be some novelistic payoff, if we accept that the ...”

“... had been Luke’s preference’), which he does as if it were a parlour game, choosing names – Alexander, Marielle – that can be made to yield the Russian-sounding diminutives that chime with his literary tastes. This piece of backstory arrives almost literally at the back of the story, when Ayush’s section of the book is nearly over, with twenty pages ...”

“... a stetson, jodhpur-like trousers and tall leather boots. He looks like an Edwardian Indiana Jones, or some strange dystopian scoutmaster living half-wild in the woods. Fellow explorers described him as having an ‘indomitable will’ and ‘infinite resource’, a man ‘in hand to hand combat with the wilderness’. In Conan Doyle’s South American ...”

“... quo during what turned out to be the last years before decolonisation. Under the labour leader Alexander Bustamante, pressure for Jamaican independence was mounting, and there were anti-colonial demonstrations all over the Caribbean. The RWF had one company permanently stationed in British Honduras, where dissatisfaction with British rule was particularly ...”

“... an intractable schoolboy. There is also a more genial side to the schoolboy dimension. Emrys Jones pointed out in a brilliant British Academy lecture how Pope’s dunces disport themselves like ‘children at play’, shouting, chattering, having peeing competitions and the rest, though none of this appears in Mr Grigson’s extracts. An analogous ...”

“... spent their off-season studying the game of the faux-populists, and now have them in their sights. Alexander Clapp Hungary and the Czech RepublicMembership of the EU has allowed several hundred thousand Hungarians to escape by emigration the increasingly punitive conditions of life under Viktor Orbán. One of the most striking features of Hungary since ...”

“... One can see why the theme keeps popping up in Hollywood, notably in Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, where the Indian actor Amrish Puri plays Mola Ram, the high priest of Thuggee, ranting in Hindi as he tears a victim’s heart out with his bare hands. The book from which The Deceivers was derived was, Merchant noted, ‘loosely ...”

“... War was looming when Alexander Korda’s film Fire over England was released in 1937. It stars Flora Robson as Elizabeth I, and as the opening titles roll the voiceover sets the scene: ‘the free people of a small island’ defy the tyranny of a Continental power and ‘a woman guides and inspires them.’ Robson, firm of jaw and bristling with double-decker ruffs and farthingales, outwits the dastardly Spanish and the Armada is defeated ...”

“... that the Buddha was a Negro. Various British residents in India, including the great Sir William Jones, discoverer of the Indo-European language roots, echoed this: the Buddha had the nose and lips and the ‘crisp and woolly’ hair of Africans. (Others thought that the curls on the Buddha’s head were snails.) Athanasius Kircher, whose name is always ...”

“... I Only Hope That Both Mother And Baby Die In Childbirth’), horoscopes, Vinny ‘Nutsgrabber’ Jones. Even the infamous ‘GOTCHA!’ is dusted down to celebrate the sinking of the poll tax flagship. However subversive their aims, however extreme their sentiments, the copywriters of Class War, committed to the task of selling mob violence as the solution ...”

“... example of the man on the cross is what makes it so. I once argued with my mother, Diana Wynne Jones, about the conclusions to her best books, The Homeward Bounders and Fire and Hemlock, both of which end in a similar way, with the main characters appearing to give up everything, including people they love, in order to anchor or reconstruct the rest of the ...”

“... enough.Michael Powell first met Emeric Pressburger in 1939, at a script meeting organised by Alexander Korda, the dominant figure in British film during the 1930s and 1940s. Powell had been hired to direct Korda’s fantasy epic The Thief of Bagdad, released in 1940; Pressburger had been a screenwriter at Berlin’s UFA studios until 1933, when Jews were ...”

“... which counted St Luke as a patron saint and appealed to cultivated princes. After all, hadn’t Alexander the Great visited the studio of Apelles?Armed with such classical precedents, painters increasingly behaved as a class apart, marked out by their intellectual aspirations, communion with nude bodies and strange habits of working at night. A gothic print ...”