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“... of France’s fortifications along its eastern border with Germany. Donald and his brother, Peter, are not yet proficient enough in English to understand the text, so Joe translates it into German:The essential points of the French system, which was carried out on a gigantic scale, are as follows: a line of fortified casemates giving each other mutual ...”

“... von Hartmann, who selected one and, so to speak, played it. Then a third friend, the dancer, Alexander Sacharoff, joined them and improvised a dance to the music, concluding by pointing to that painting which he felt best expressed what he had just danced. As Butler recounts, in what is really the centrepiece of his book, Kandinsky was so excited by ...”

“... not even be concealed from the Labour Party. ‘If you can do that for armaments,’ said A.V. Alexander, ‘you are going to have great difficulty in persuading the working men of the country that it is a wrong policy to borrow for real assets in public works.’ But that was a calculation about electoral credibility, not financial confidence, where ...”

“... and the League of Nations, not to mention missionary fervour) was spreading the message that Alexander the Great had conquered the Persian Empire in order to establish the Brotherhood of Man. CAH V, too, was indelibly marked by the era that produced it. Its subtitle was ‘Athens 478-401 bc’, and its cover bore, embossed in gold, a reproduction of the ...”

“... the strain. Is there enough inherent strength in ‘the sinews of the Russian state’, to use Peter Reddaway’s phrase, to sustain the free and democratic political life which its leaders advocate, and of which there are some signs? The answers Richard Sakwa and Alexander Yakovlev give to these questions are ...”

“... seemed probable: Conolly and Charles Stoddart were beheaded in the main square of Bukhara, and Alexander Burnes hacked to death outside his house in Kabul. These misfortunes discouraged further heroics, but did nothing to assuage British fears. In 1837, Iran tried to compensate for its losses to Russia in the north by strengthening its position to the ...”

“... dropped the chapter on clubs altogether in his third edition, published in 1971.The title of Seth Alexander Thévoz’s new book suggests a return to Cobbett’s world rather than Sampson’s. His focus is also on Pall Mall, though he ventures occasionally into the empire and more hesitantly into working-men’s establishments (but never into the sporting ...”

“... with a short biography, in the recently reissued In ‘Vanity Fair’, by Roy Matthews and Peter Mellini).* When she was 20 she was painted by G.F. Watts, who was besotted with her and called her his Bambina. At the height of her notoriety she was caricatured in Punch and elsewhere. In her last days she had a deathbed photograph taken of herself, all ...”

“... of India seemed to come from France. In Egypt in 1798, Bonaparte studied the campaigns of Alexander the Great. He had corresponded with Tippoo Sahib, the Sultan of Mysore, and talked of leading the French expeditionary force on to conquer the British possessions in India. In 1800, the Russian Empire’s frontier was still a long way from that of ...”

“... a Battenberg prince related by marriage to the British royal family; and a fifth the future King Peter of Serbia. (Nicholas’s son, Prince Mirko, is aid to have been the inspiration for Danilo Danilowitsch in Lehar’s The Merry Widow. Nicholas’s support for the insurrection against Ottoman rule in neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1870s inspired ...”

“... selling tickets for a benefit concert which starred the cast of Beyond the Fringe. At the gig, Peter Cook performed his Harold Macmillan routine, comparing the four-minute warning before a nuclear strike to Roger Bannister’s mile record (‘I’d like you to know that in this great country of ours a man can run a mile in four minutes’). In August I ...”

“... Diaghilev ballet’. The influence of the Ballets Russes went much deeper than décor, however. As Peter Jacobs writes, it supplied a model of ‘a pagan liberty and a savage beauty, combined with a stylised severity or formal purity’, a liberty and a beauty embodied, one might add, in Nijinsky’s legs, to gaze on which Keynes briefly abandoned his Treatise ...”

“... a New York gallery of Sots Art, an ironic appropriation of ‘socialist’ art by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, into trying to understand the deeper significance of Socialist Realism. This fascinating book swoops and lurches from topic to topic, but the reader’s feeling of disorientation is more than compensated for by the exhilaration of the ...”

“... in Brittany met Geneviève Hamon, who became his companion and collaborator. Through her he met Alexander Calder, Jacques Prévert and the photographer Eli Lotar. He became friends with Eisenstein, Buñuel and Jean Vigo. (The severed and preserved hands kept by the old sailor Père Jules in L’Atalante were sourced and supplied by Painlevé.) Among ...”

“... 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 ...”