“... had tripped over one of Caroline’s dolls and broken his neck in the White House nursery’ – Alexander Cockburn, the Nation, 6 January 1992. The third argument is micro-historical. It punctures holes in the details, brings up contradictory testimony, offers alternative hypotheses. It tends to trail off into indeterminacy: we’ll never know who did ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the recording of ‘Menelik (The Lion of Judah)’, by an eight-man group led by Rex Stewart, the Alexander Calder of the cornet, whose uninhibited behaviour as man and musician had earned him the nickname ‘Boy’. ‘Boy Meets Horn’ (1938), with its witty half-valving, was Stewart’s most famous solo feature with Ellington. ‘Menelik (The Lion of ...”

“... her remotely right. They included Chris Patten, John Patten, William Waldegrave and Tristan Garel-Jones, and were soon to be joined by John Major. In the pamphlet they used as an epigraph a line from Macmillan: ‘We have at least the most important thing of all at the head of our government, a prime minister of courage, who I hope will not be led away from ...”

“... Chile, still less the West’s strategic obsession with the Soviet Gulag and the reminiscences of Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Hassan, after all, was one of ours. And although this dark period of Moroccan history is thought to have ended thirty years ago, it’s far from clear that Mohammed VI, the present king, is the new broom he was thought to be when he ...”

“... in 16th-century portraits; or perhaps a younger – and far slighter – version of Veronese’s Alexander receiving the children of Darius after the battle of Issus: with the same high forehead and suggestion of hair thinning a bit at the temples. His features certainly seemed to belong to that epoch of painting: the faces in Elizabethan ...”