“... to be the Habsburgs’ longest serving and most effective functionary in the Low Countries, Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma. A more immediate success was that otherwise inexplicable papal readiness to grant the untried Society its generous Bull of Foundation in 1540. There was back-up. Leonor de Mascarenhas, a strong-minded, cultured and celibate ...”

“... English history as the domain of faction. He would have had to explore the consequences of the Stuart-Palatine marriage of 1613; he would have had to relate the history of Western Europe in the 17th century, a subject his friend William Robertson had not explored; and the history of the succession to the English and Scottish thrones would have involved him ...”

“... question and answer session which followed Anthony Giddens’s first Reith Lecture, the left-wing Stuart Hall argued that globalisation came with a right-wing agenda tied to its tail, one which was destructive of social solidarities, while the right-wing John Redwood objected that it came veined with social-democratic notions which discouraged governments ...”

“... in the Army under control, preventing any remonstrance by his officers against Charles Stuart, or ‘any single-person rule’, on the grounds that they should not meddle with civil authority. By mid-March, Monck appears to have bowed to the popular will to bring back the King; on 19 March, he accepted a letter from the King and was secretly giving ...”

“... and cultural models to be imitated across the globe. ‘The true test of a good government,’ Alexander Hamilton wrote, ‘is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.’ It is a test the United States and Britain have failed ruinously during the current crisis. Both countries had weeks of warnings about the coronavirus outbreak in ...”

“... a soft boy in a hard world?’ It’s a question asked by the hero’s older brother in Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, worthy winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, and it is just as much the preoccupation of his follow-up, Young Mungo, as shown by the new novel’s dedication: ‘For Alexander and all the gentle sons of ...”

“... writer’, and he cut some contributions by more than half. One enemy he certainly made was Alexander Balloch Grosart DD, who was invited to contribute several entries for the first volumes, principally on 17th-century divines. As early as October 1883, Stephen was complaining that he had ‘had my usual letter of abuse from that old fool ...”

“... duck.’ But, in any case, he experienced a spike in approval ratings and became what the pollster Stuart Spencer called ‘a martyred surviving hero’.Reagan did have something to offer the ideologues. He refused to negotiate with striking air traffic controllers and ultimately crushed their union. This legitimated the government’s right to hire ...”

“... University of Sussex in 1986. But she would like us, she said, to see Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander if we could, and to read ‘The Immortal Story’ by Isak Dinesen, ‘whom I have since discovered has become rather trrrendy’ (a film had just been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring Robert ...”

“... by ephemeral bands of Pashtun gunmen. The commander of the paratroopers, Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal, had imagined himself making a hundred-man foray into deep Helmand, away from the relatively quiet towns of Lashkar Gah and Gereshk, once a month. In the end, in the first month, he sent his men out on a dozen raids. The defence minister John Reid ...”

“... businesses and their owners by isolating them from any connection with the dollar economy. Stuart Levey, Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence between 2004 and 2011, pioneered a way of inflicting destruction far beyond any designated target. His innovation was to target banks that dealt in any way with one of the tens of ...”

“... brown brogue boots. He was 47 but looked about 29. There was something studied about him – the Alexander McQueen scarf, the lawyerly punctilio – and I’d never met anyone who spoke so easily about such large sums of money. When I asked him the point of the whole exercise he said it was simple: ‘Buy in, sell out, make some zeroes.’ MacGregor ...”