“... to be discarded so easily. We cherish what we fear most: Ocean was hard to dislodge. What brought Alexander’s eastward career of conquest to a halt was his confident assurance to his men that they were about to reach Ocean’s shores. When faced by the interminable Ganges plain instead, they mutinied, and small wonder.So Pytheas’ venture required both ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to get this disorderly province of the mind finally under control and to issue a clear map of it. Peter Reynolds, in his admirable book, cites one such map, from an American anthropologist writing in 1901: 1. The mentality of animals is instinctive rather than ratiocinative, and for each species responds practically alike to like stimuli; 2. the savage mind ...”

“... account of Tsar Paul’s overthrow in 1799 (the year of Pushkin’s birth) in favour of his son Alexander, her tone is neutral. Alexander had apparently been assured that no harm would come to his father but ‘in the event’ Paul happened to be strangled amid the confusion. Easily done. Pushkin’s looks are an ...”

“... Technologies, the big data firm set up by the PayPal co-founder and Republican Party funder Peter Thiel, and Faculty, a small artificial intelligence company previously employed by Cummings’s Vote Leave campaign.During the summer, I was surprised to stumble across the name Public First in a spreadsheet of Cabinet Office spending data. Public First is ...”

“... even when I wish that he had been more selective in writing up the contents of his notebooks. Alexander Frater’s Chasing the Monsoon (1990) is like Fiennes’s book in that it chronicles a journey corresponding to one of the Earth’s great sequential events. Frater never makes me impatient with an overload of quirky detail or a detour from the ...”

“... from one clan grave to another while the present Stuart claimant to the throne, Michael James Alexander, was being interviewed by BBC Scotland. He is a gentle Belgian socialist who once worked as a waiter in Edinburgh but has taken up PR. ‘I felt it was important to attend,’ he told the cameras. ‘Ethnic cleansing was carried out after Culloden and ...”

“... add: ‘Why did gold become money in the first place?’ Or: ‘Will gold ever be money again?’ Peter Bernstein’s history of gold as money is very much better at answering the first question than the other two. Pecuniary anthropology is very, very perilous. In the absence of evidence, both Aristotle and Adam Smith made implausible conjectures about the ...”

“... and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions about both Unionists and liberals. Among the most memorable creations in his gallery of bien-pensant absurdity was the trendy ...”

“... the school’s great festival, or to those who pretended not to, like the Harrovian Field Marshal Alexander. There was something strangely fake about his snobbish carry-on, almost as though he was trying to convince himself that he belonged. Some of his smoking-room metaphors were merely mystifying: for example, when pondering whether Cyprus should be granted ...”

“... to Rudd as well. Accused of describing Rudd in those terms, the former Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer replied: ‘I don’t use the c-word but I do use the f-word pretty freely and I can tell you Kevin Rudd is a fucking awful person.’) When Pietersen was discovered a couple of years ago to have been sending derogatory texts about his England ...”

“... and its works, all you need to know is that it has just three honorary fellows: Friedrich Hayek, Alexander Solzhenitsyn – and Ronald Reagan. The present volume, in other words, would make soothing bedside reading for Mrs Margaret Thatcher, not least because its opening contribution comes from her favourite TV star and economist, Milton Friedman, the man ...”

“... killed. And to start with, despite the impressive treatment given to the independent third force, Alexander Tairov and his collaborators at the Chamber Theatre, Dr Rudnitsky cannot quite avoid furthering this binary version of events. One of the merits of his book, though, is the way in which he gradually introduces other clearly original directors, starting ...”

“... of a common Russian sensibility such as Tolstoy had imagined in his dancing scene’. Since Peter the Great, however, this ‘common Russian sensibility’ always contained a European admixture, and Figes criticises those – Rilke, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf – who swallowed whole the myth of a completely indigenous ‘Russian soul’. All the great ...”