“... The president of Bulgaria is ‘a lovely guy’ and Jean Chrétien ‘a good guy’. Douglas Alexander is ‘a very clever guy’ and José María Aznar ‘a tough guy’ (a mark of approval). Only Gordon Brown – ominously for him – is ‘a strange guy’. Other character assessments are equally breezy. ‘She is a great person, Tessa [Jowell], just ...”

“... On the last day of January 1919, the Soviet New Year, the poet Alexander Blok smashed up his father-in-law’s desk. ‘Symbolic action’, Blok recorded pithily in his diary. Michael Gordin’s book helps to explain the action’s symbolism and its violence. Blok’s father-in-law, the desk’s first owner, was the greatest of Russian chemists, Dmitrii Mendeleev, who died in 1907 at the age of 73 ...”

“... only so much damage one can do with a Robert Frost interview, but that didn’t stop the late Peter Matthiessen, one of the founding editors, from now and then leaving the office, or the Himalayas, to spy on supposed enemies of the United States. Matthiessen later said he had used the magazine as cover for some high-level snitching, but in the annals of ...”

“... Garfield arrived early at the old Baltimore and Potomac depot ...’ (He was, of course, shot: Alexander Graham Bell rigged up an electrical machine which failed to find the position of the bullet.) ‘At about the time the Roentgens were celebrating their last quiet Christmas outside the limelight in 1895, young Tolman Cunnings was losing an argument in a ...”

“... in a conformist desert. But however heavy the yoke of opinion, that of law was undoubtedly light. Alexander Herzen commented that ‘in England the policeman at your door or within your doors adds a feeling of security.’ Malwida von Meysenburg experienced ‘a pleasant feeling of freedom’ when no one asked to see her passport on her arrival. Ferencz ...”

“... Barbara McClintock’s attention to her fields of maize was that of a natural historian; so was Alexander Fleming’s observation of the mould on his Petri dish. Galileo’s telescope had shown that the heavens were interestingly imperfect. He made drawings which revealed that the Moon had mountains, and he saw Jupiter’s moons. But behind the ...”

“... wealth of India had been a legend in the Mediterranean since the fourth century bc, enhanced by Alexander the Great’s forays. India, not China, was Rome’s greatest trading partner. The sea was, after all, the fastest and most economic mode of travel in the pre-modern world. As William Dalrymple points out in The Golden Road, ships could carry much ...”

“... Scepticism are obvious from the opening pages of Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties, Sir Peter Strawson’s urbane, elegant, and, alas, short new book: ‘The Sceptic is, strictly, not one who denies the validity of certain types of belief, but one who questions, if only initially and for methodological reasons, the adequacy of our grounds for ...”

“... cities. In 1247 it acquired its own minor prince, and in 1262 it was awarded to Daniel, the son of Alexander Nevsky. After that it grew steadily in riches and power. Daniel’s descendants gradually accumulated territory, by conquest, purchase and dynastic marriage. They also claimed ever grander titles, until Ivan IV was crowned tsar (caesar, emperor) in ...”

“... have had a lurid hold on the popular imagination for at least two millennia. The idea that St Peter was crucified upside down was no sooner taken as a sign of his self-proclaimed unworthiness to share the fate of Jesus, than it was reinterpreted as a mark of his common sense. Even a poor fisherman knew that hanging head down brought the oblivion of ...”

“... off from Gérard Depardieu, or Georges, the insidious, attractive fortysomething we remember in Peter Weir’s Green Card (1990). The idea that Depardieu has gone or is going anywhere is endlessly tantalising: he has never been more insistent, more palpably at home or preposterous than he is now, as he promises the French he’ll be waddling off in ...”

“... backed off and charged again, while the nanny waited nearby, a seemingly dispassionate spectator. Peter Coates’s study of the evolving meanings of ‘nature’, in Europe and North America, is preoccupied with the human tendency to invade nature, altering, exploiting and ‘reinventing’ it. He culls a telling image from the Guardian for 9 August ...”

“... he only really sputtered to life again in 1990 with an autobiography, and died a few years later. Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg at the Hotel de Londres, Paris in 1957. Bob Thompson, ‘LeRoi Jones and his Family’ (1964) Brion Gysin, ‘Calligraphy’ (1960) Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Untitled (Primrose Path, the Third Mind, p.12, 1965) Ettore ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that great treasury of German science and literature, Lessing and Schiller, Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt.’ German culture seemed doubly the culture of freedom: it was not only the language of human idealism, but the gateway out of the ghetto. Indeed language became a weapon – in the hands of the Government, to impose political ...”