“... 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 ...”

“... holding, and never will hold.’ It’s the specific image of the pregnant widow, quoted from Alexander Herzen, that seems so clumsy: ‘The departing world leaves behind it, not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.’ The image is ...”

“... the period from 1660 – this is omitting foreign authors, pseudonymous characters like ‘Captain Alexander Smith’, and others whose masculinity may be nominal. It would be rash to expect all these to qualify for Spender’s epithet ‘good’. But if Ann Emelinda Skinn and M. Peddle (two of Dale’s hundred best tunes) deserve a place in the record, it is ...”

“... more references in Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment, which has a paper by Alexander Broadie on Reid’s pre-Reformation Scottish precursors. In general, Reid stands to benefit from the current upturn in the fortunes of the history of philosophy, which comes after several decades in which philosophers have tended to behave as if their ...”

“... in order to offset the desiccating effect of the documentary record. Katherine Duncan-Jones describes a bit of a shark in Ungentle Shakespeare (2001), and is very good at extracting plausible matter even from Aubrey’s anecdotes. She also adds lively and often credible dashes of speculation of her own, such as the suggestion that Shakespeare and ...”

“... and invisible sexism embedded in normal usage. Sometimes that sexism becomes explicit, as when Alexander Pope begins his ‘Epistle to a Lady on the Characters of Women’ with ‘Nothing so true as what you once let fall:/“Most Women have no Characters at all.”’ In that couplet Pope was responding to a long-standing tradition that linked character ...”

“... the preoccupation of his follow-up, Young Mungo, as shown by the new novel’s dedication: ‘For Alexander and all the gentle sons of Glasgow’. The worlds of the books are continuous – deprived Glasgow and its environs in the Thatcher years and after – but the characters are not, even if someone who is clearly Shuggie puts in a cameo appearance, asking ...”

“... his desire to pose as the champion of blue-collar workers and his obsessive interest in the Dow Jones index, which doesn’t react well to his economic nationalism. While Trumpian rhetoric emphasises the dignity of labour, even economists inclined to favour protectionism have struggled to find any substantial group of American workers that has benefited ...”

“... for Lord Hay’s Masque – almost certainly devised by the pre-eminent artist of the genre, Inigo Jones – followed in this tradition: its action opened on a magnificent prospect of woodland, with a Bower of Flora, a House of Night and Diana’s Tree of Chastity, in front of which danced nine 15-foot golden trees. At the end of the dance, each tree opened to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... country lad, a Quaker from County Durham (‘Why, aye!’). He’s Enlightenment Man in his Tom Jones aspect, a bright, good-natured extrovert who wags his tail at all that interests him, like a friendly dog. Mason, on the other hand, is Enlightenment Man in his sombre, ‘Gothickal’ aspect. He is haunted by the ghost of his dead wife, Rebekah. He dreams ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his muse for Ireland now’! And an article should be written comparing Wilson with Tsar Alexander I at the Congress of Vienna. All this was very unrealistic, and illusions were quickly shattered. In the event, Ireland’s first representatives in Paris were Sean T. O’Kelly and George Gavan Duffy. O’Kelly, who had been a member of Dublin ...”

“... 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 ...”