“... weapons – God uses them to pelt the devils who listen in on his conversations with angels:A star caught a devil eavesdroppingAnd shot down, a flame burning in its wakeLike a horseman in the desert who has loosened his turbanIts ends fluttering behind himIn Book I, ‘On the Heavens and the Earth’, al-Nuwayri classifies the constellations and also 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 disappointment in ...”

“... ones – sound by and large like nothing. Try getting some joy out of the sound dots of the star-map-inspired orchestral piece Atlas Eclipticalis of 1961, or from the previous year’s Cartridge Music for phonograph cartridges and amplified small objects (recently issued in David Tudor’s realisation – alas, not even he prevails here – on a Mode ...”

“... Englishman’. His chief rival in Amazonia was a publicity-hungry American millionaire, Dr Alexander Hamilton Rice, whose state of the art radio had an aerial the size of a hang-glider. When Rice turned back after a hostile encounter with the Yanomami, Fawcett reported in characteristically clipped style that he had ‘skedaddled’ because he was ...”

“... Dark, Carcanet, 1993), Brigitte Timmermann’s The Third Man’s Vienna (Shippen Rock, 2005), and Alexander Glück’s On the Trail of The Third Man in Vienna (Styria, 2014), replete with fine photographs. The Third Man Museum in Vienna opened in 2005, and houses, among many other things, relevant film scripts, photographs, posters, 420 cover versions of ...”

“... According to Jacques-Philippe Voïart, the history painter Angélique Mongez’s prize-winning Alexander Mourning the Death of Darius’s Wife (1804) was a narrative failure, too focused on the emotions of ‘the accompanying women’ and not enough on Alexander. Others were willing to praise ambitious narrative pictures ...”

“... Manan, Azam and Margueritte). He interpreted immigration rules strictly – for example in Alexander, which the Law Lords overruled, and Marek. This last was a particularly harsh decision denying an infant admission because the mother was abroad on a business visit at the time of application. She died on the visit, so the application could not be ...”

“... the statements of the three friends she denounced as terrorists, Joseph Mooney, Brendan Magill and Alexander Rowntree. In long interviews, all three men had convinced the police that they had no connection at all with any terrorist organisation or any bombing. Yet at the trial their Irish names were left dangling in the air. To the jury they were ...”

“... to the emotions horrified its critics then and since, from Dickens to E.P. Thompson. The undoubted star here was George Whitefield rather than John Wesley. Whitefield never finished one of his open-air sermons without dissolving into tears, and he was always gratified to see thousands of his audience in tears too, for example at the collieries outside ...”

“... the citizen without qualities’. Both Barth and his Jewish contemporary Franz Rosenzweig, whose Star of Redemption outlined a politically passive notion for Jews of religious fulfilment through the performance of Jewish rituals, ended up in the same place: ‘Man’s ultimate destiny is not to be found in politics, only in divine redemption.’ This is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Henry II, fancying a saint in the family, bought Edward’s canonisation from the schismatic Pope Alexander III in 1161 in return for some very welcome support. Henry III rebuilt the abbey in 1245 as a shrine to St Edward – and a royal mausoleum to himself, almost bankrupting the Crown in the process. The abbey’s own website calls him ‘recklessly ...”

“... by President Macron’s pledge to make the rebuilding a national project; he appointed a five-star general, Jean-Louis Georgelin, to oversee the work. While this, naturally, ruffled feathers in the Ministry of Culture, and the programme has had its difficulties and its critics, the vast project, which on any given day involves about a thousand people ...”

“... opium isn’t surprising: poppy juice had been known for its medicinal properties since antiquity. Alexander the Great’s army may have introduced Anatolian opium into Iran, a history implicit in the linguistic connections between Greek opion, Persian afyun and Indian afeem. Mercantile networks across Asia carried it to China, where it was known as ...”

“... up long-term residence in his consciousness. As president, Reagan routinely invoked the Notre Dame star when he implored subordinates to ‘go out there and win one for the Gipper.’ A Regular Guy, a mediocre football player, could supplant the star and become a legend in his own head. As Reagan told the Hollywood writer ...”