“... 1824, when he gained his freedom from Count Sheremetev, the man who owned him. Forty years before Alexander II freed the mass of Russia’s serfs, this felt like a miracle. ‘I will not describe the emotions I experienced in those first minutes of profound, stunning joy,’ Nikitenko writes. ‘I can only say Glory to the Almighty and proclaim my eternal ...”

“... Who Came to Dinner, in the New York theatre. The last, Kaufman and Hart’s poisoned valentine to Alexander Woollcott, with its portrait of the critic as wit, tyrant and friend of the celebrated, clearly allured him. Echoes of its style appear frequently in his undergraduate writing, part of a generalised admiration for the world of the New Yorker, Cole ...”

“... foe, and ran the drama happily through in his mind. A few weeks later the newsreels showed King Alexander of Yugoslavia being mown down by a Croatian assassin on exactly that spot. ‘I felt oddly guilty, but also pleased. In the Mediterranean sunshine there were strange and violent men with whom I could identify, and with whom, in a way, I was now in ...”

“... an exclusive copyright in the name Macedonia, bitterly resents the expropriation of the 16-pointed star of Vergina, found in the tomb of Philip of Macedon, for the national flag of the new Macedonian Republic, and fears that its constitution implies irredentist ambitions at her expense. Hence, the English-speaking visitor is bombarded by not entirely ...”

“... They have no support from the state.’ Since the crown passed from the exiled Russian aristocrat, Alexander Alekhine, in 1946, only the iconic Bobby Fischer has wrested it from Russia. Chess is now practised by ominously boring people (like me) who recall classic encounters from centuries ago (Russell’s favourite is the so-called Pearl of Wijk aan Zee, a ...”

“... be remembered for his criticisms of nuclear weapons and his proposal that the USA should rely on Star Wars to protect itself. Furthermore he has now signed the most far-reaching arms-control agreement yet negotiated with the Soviet Union. But Vidal apparently enjoys provoking the wrath of the Administration almost as much as he enjoys re-creating the ...”

“... from one clan grave to another while the present Stuart claimant to the throne, Michael James Alexander, was being interviewed by BBC Scotland. He is a gentle Belgian socialist who once worked as a waiter in Edinburgh but has taken up PR. ‘I felt it was important to attend,’ he told the cameras. ‘Ethnic cleansing was carried out after Culloden and ...”

“... Edric’s fascination with lives on the margins makes Gurney a logical choice. As a poet, his star has spent decades slowly rising. Two collections, Severn and Somme (1917) and War’s Embers (1919), were greeted with a courteous near-silence that ensured the rejection of his third. Born in 1890, Gurney was the son of a Gloucester tailor. He won a ...”

“... of the Observer and the New York Times, captured the now suspended CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, bragging to someone he believed was a potential client that he’d met Trump ‘many times’ and master-minded the entire Trump campaign strategy. Nix implies that those forty thousand votes were scientifically wrested from Hillary and delivered ...”

“... to teach me to keep quiet. One’s legs often got felt up as a child. Dad’s old headmaster, Mr Alexander, used to give us lessons in algebra and he was a great stroker and clutcher, though only of the legs and not the parts appertaining. Vicars did it too, without seeming to want to take it further. It was something I came to expect, and just another of ...”

“... its best hotel. Since he worked very much in concert with his two principal competitors – Alexander Clifford of the Daily Mail and Christopher Buckley of the Daily Telegraph – this was something they normally achieved, although at times they went one better by occupying the former enemy commander’s former villa. He was lucky enough, in fact, to ...”

“... in the whole of Russia). Naturally the family was anti-Bolshevik, and equally naturally, the young Alexander was fed Bolshevik heroism and Revolutionary fervour at school. The resulting social tension Solzhenitsyn himself regards as having conditioned his entire development; it caused him to subordinate the values of personal life to those of public ...”

“... and her male counterpart, Cross Sugarman; Darden Pittard, ‘our class’s cool black guy’; Alexander Héverd, from Paris, rumoured to be ‘a druggie’; and Conchita Maxwell, daughter of Ernie ‘the Oil King’ Maxwell and his much younger Mexican cleaning lady. Finally, there are Lee’s roommates: Dede, ‘literally, a follower’, whose obvious ...”

“... after the misogyny she faced for daring to present a BBC2 series without the looks of a film star, and after the OBE, comes the doorstop SPQR to charm the charts and critics both. Beard gives us a sweeping Roman history that’s both reassuringly familiar and abidingly strange. The material matters, of course, and it doesn’t get better than ...”

“... Theodore Sedgwick who came to Stockbridge ‘after the Revolution’, and who was a friend of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington. His descendants (but not, importantly, all of them) are buried, in ‘the Pie’, with their heads facing out and their feet pointing in, towards their ancestor. The legend is, apparently, that on Judgment Day the ...”