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“... I am satisfied with Alexander and he ought to be satisfied with me,’ Napoleon wrote to the Empress Josephine in 1807. ‘If he were a woman, I think I would make him my mistress.’ Within five years, the tsar would repay Napoleon’s condescension by rolling back his conquests all across Europe, driving him to Paris and then St Helena, and finally building the Concert of Europe on the remains of his empire ...”

“... Eighteen months later, the Scythians were in Paris, but in a surprising new guise. Tsar Alexander I arrived on the last day of March 1814 at the head of an army of half a million troops from Russia, Britain, Sweden, the Habsburg Empire and the German principalities. No fires were started. Alexander had come, he ...”

“... achievements, the Jesuits quickly attracted suspicion and hostility, including from the occasional pope, and after a quarter-millennium an accumulation of their enemies bullied Pope Clement XIV into dissolving the entire enterprise in 1773. Yet the Society was not that easily undone: it survived in what it would be ...”

“... is in some degree a commentary on what it represents. Of the effect of Bernini’s monument to Pope Alexander VII, Penny says: ‘In the dim light of the basilica it is the glowing white marble and the shimmering diasporo of which we are most aware; but the electric light with which the tomb has been flooded for the photograph illustrated here gives ...”

“... In 1779, a Scottish doctor called William Alexander published a two-volume History of Women. Alexander was a man of the Enlightenment who regarded politeness to women as a mark of civilisation. Savages and ‘musselmen’ might treat their women as sexual helots, but a gentleman was solicitous of his womenfolk ...”

“... cash poor and land rich,’ he said. ‘And who needs more second-growth pine and manzanita?’ Alexander Pope, in his upstream exile at Twickenham, laid out garden and grotto as a conceit, an extension of his work into the world, and a powerful attractor for patrons and lesser talents. To fund the Sierra reinhabitation, as Snyder saw it, he took on ...”

“... results. Neither, however, enjoyed fighting for its own sake, as Caesar did, or Napoleon, or Alexander, or Stonewall Jackson, by far the most talented commander of the American Civil War. To them it was – or became – like a drug, an addiction that could not be given up. Had he lived, Alexander might have invaded ...”

“... 4); and so on. The text often blooms into a special boxed feature, such as: ‘The Joke about the Pope and the Chief Rabbi’ (this takes a whole page) or: Haggadah (Pop Quiz #1) Q. When Alex and Adam had a smoke, how much of the fun was in the rolling? A. In the book it is written: Oh, about 78 per cent. Every so often Smith will surprise us with an ...”

“... governments. Scientific discovery is evidently a dimly understood process. The new biography of Alexander Fleming by Gwyn Macfarlane sheds some unusual light on the fog. One reason for the prevailing lack of understanding is that the canons of writing in professional scientific journals – the ‘scientific literature’ – enforce a style of reporting ...”

“... Crucifixions, though not to the crude forger whose handiwork, together with its authentication by Pope Alexander VI, is proudly displayed at S. Croce in Gerusalemme at Rome. In the later Roman Empire Greeks were under increasing pressure to learn Latin; their efforts produce substandard Latin of a very different kind from that of poorly educated native ...”

“... Barberini emblem, the bee: Melissographia, an engraved broadsheet eulogising both the Barberini Pope and their own keen-eyed work, showing magnified bees (front, back, sideways and dissected head parts, surrounded by bay leaves and the Papal keys and tiara), was the first printed illustration to have been made with the aid of a microscope. Apes Diana was a ...”

“... Bruce took the throne in 1306 after a long period of wrangling over the succession. The death of Alexander III in 1286 without surviving issue and the subsequent death in 1290 of his young granddaughter, Margaret, Maid of Norway, while she was being brought to Scotland, left no clear heir and the kingdom plummeted into political turmoil. The main competitors ...”

“... must explain her hazardous use of words. She’d met Sandy, her husband, when he drove one of the Alexander buses about the town of Elgin. She happened to be the clippy on the same bus, and she would often tell me about the beauty of those single-decker vehicles (‘the Bluebird’) and the handsomeness of Sandy behind the wheel. Now she was furious all the ...”

“... It was only in 1588, when the Catholic counter-offensive was well under way and the reigning Pope was the vigorous Sixtus V – who had no lack of nerve – that saints began to be made again, starting with Diego of Alcala. The revival of saint-making was accompanied by another step in the central control of the sacred, or the right to define the ...”

“... The Continental diplomacy of the 1650s was deeply affected by the rival efforts of Cromwell and Pope Alexander VII to line up their co-religionist princes. Even after 1688, as Prestwich notes, John Locke regarded the war waged by England and the Netherlands against France as a struggle for the survival of Protestantism. There is one other ...”