“... Russia had been reconstituted from the ruins of the Soviet Union, the Russian Vice-President, Alexander Rutskoi, wrote in tones of patriotic despair about the queues for Moscow’s first McDonald’s, on Pushkin Square: the death of his country’s culture was taking place in the square named after its most famous poet. That people, not all of them ...”

“... a research institute under Abel Aganbegyan’s National Institute of the Economy. Others included Alexander Shokhin, who had been economic adviser to Eduard Shevardnadze while the latter was foreign minister; Anatoly Chubais, economic adviser to Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St Petersburg; Konstantin Kagalovsky, who set up an Institute of the Market with ...”

“... for new political figures who burst brightly on the scene was: ‘Don’t be a Kerensky!’ Alexander Kerensky was the leader of the February Revolution in 1917 and briefly the darling of the democratic world until the Bolsheviks consigned him to the dustbin of history nine months later. He spent the last 53 years of his life eking out a living as a ...”

“... stars Russia’s favourite actor/film-maker Nikita Mikhalkov, an ardent monarchist who plays Alexander III in his own patriotic blockbuster, The Barber of Siberia. Mikhalkov is a middlebrow figure, but higher up the scale, Alexander Sokurov, the country’s leading art-film director, reproduces much the same ...”

“... Bruno’s development of the ancient ‘Art of Memory’. Another figure at James’s court, Alexander Dickson, was the foremost supporter of Bruno in Britain. The attraction of Masonic ritual and sodality for Scots of the higher classes was enhanced by the exceptional prestige of architecture in the 17th century. ‘The concepts of the Vitruvian ...”

“... and low-level managers to build the rudiments of a public administration. Angola’s colonial masters had kept the population in a state of helplessness; poorer Portuguese in this settler colony had done the jobs performed by Africans in other European possessions. Eighty-five per cent of Angolans were illiterate at independence; there was almost nothing ...”

“... and cultural models to be imitated across the globe. ‘The true test of a good government,’ Alexander Hamilton wrote, ‘is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.’ It is a test the United States and Britain have failed ruinously during the current crisis. Both countries had weeks of warnings about the coronavirus outbreak in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... here in a tradition which includes the Rochester of ‘Upon Nothing’, Erasmus and More – the masters of both Swift and Pope – and ultimately Socrates. Pope’s Dunciad, which is similarly something other than prophetic, works by the same radical principle of subversion. It exposes worldly rituals of status, folly ‘high on a gorgeous seat’, all ...”

“... Nato members – to the north. To attack Ukraine, to intervene to defend Putin’s awkward client Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, to pivot to face Nato-member Latvia, to have soldiers sitting on their camp beds playing endless hands of durak: no doubt the Russian general staff has rehearsed all eventualities.It’s striking how many times, in the past few ...”

“... that before there can be solidarity, a little humility would help.Towards​ the end of 1826, Alexander Pushkin was playing chess with a friend who, as he put it, ‘knew a lot of the kinds of thing they study in universities while we were learning to dance’. The friend checkmated Pushkin with his knight and remarked: ‘Cholera morbus is at our ...”

“... was open to discussions on the hunger strikers’ demands if they would stop their fast. Their IRA masters would not let them do that, but they did start talking about terms for ending the protest. The talks broke down, but they had the effect of raising expectations among the families of the remaining hunger strikers that their lives might be spared. This ...”

“... writer, and length of life, might be expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner ...”

“... place were not destitute in the languages, yet it is observ’d of them, they were by this made masters of the English tongue, and more of them excelled in that particular than of any school at that time. Here were produced of ministers, Mr Timothy Cruso, Mr Hannot of Yarmouth, Mr Nathaniel Taylor, Mr Owen and several others; and of another kind, poets ...”