“... had just handed in their passports at the window. ‘Biletov nyet,’ a voice barked from behind a brown computer console labelled ‘Robotron’. The rest happened quickly. I saw my father pick up my passport and – perhaps hoping I wouldn’t notice – silently insert a $20 note before instructing me to go up to the counter and ask the lady to check ...”

“... became more formal and more centralised. First the bishops became involved, acting, as Peter Brown puts it in his brilliant study The Cult of the Saints, as ‘spiritual impresarios’. Then it was the turn of the Popes, such as Urban II in the 11th century, Calixtus II in the 12th and Gregory IX in the 13th. As Professor Barlow reminds us in an essay ...”

“... the less clear things become. Take the meeting of Stash and Francesca. Mrs Krantz defines Prince Alexander Vassilivitch Valensky, alias Stash, as ‘the great war hero and incomparable polo-player’. Stash is Daisy’s father. Francesca Vernon, the film star, is her mother. Francesca possesses ‘a combination of tranquillity and pure sensuality in the ...”

“... the nearly blank expressions, the eloquent intervals, the airy combination of dusty pink, chestnut brown, pale blue and white: all mark this painting as the earliest and perhaps the most interesting example of Piero’s influence on a great modern artist. In Young Spartans, which belongs to the same years and is now in the National Gallery, the group of elders ...”

“... with approval: ‘the fact that you were always a little bit healthily cold, and yet you had brown bread’ appealed to a temperament of which high thinking and plain living were to be enduring characteristics. After one glass of white wine had been poured, Clapp remembers ruefully, the bottle would be recorked and put back in the fridge. Clearly ...”

“... popular text was the Secretum secretorum, supposedly Aristotle’s teachings as passed directly to Alexander the Great, translated from Arabic into Latin. Another canonical text after 1300 was De anima by pseudo-Avicenna, which argued that the three basic ingredients in alchemy were human blood, hair and birds’ eggs. Students of such works were zealous ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her car.’ Kostas Manos, born 50 years ago, is tall, with enormous fingers and a mass of greying brown hair that seems made of fine wire. He’s wearing a Sarah Lund sweater and looks as if he’s leaped out of some tough black and white world of chainsmoking and bare light bulbs and bread for supper. His son Alexander is ...”

“... airless space. I hated it, and only went inside a couple of times, probably dared by my brother, Alexander. Daddy always walked straight past it. A bit further on, next to a lock, there was an even smaller pillbox, but I never got beyond putting my foot in the doorway.When we asked Daddy what these pillboxes were for, he said they had been put there during ...”

“... of migration between countries within Africa. Jones gives short shrift to scholars such as Wendy Brown, who argued in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010) that today’s border walls are a sign not of strength but that state sovereignty is being eroded by globalisation: they fulfil a psychological role, by providing a reassuring image of security to a ...”

“... out a Bill of Rights to amend the constitution. The driving force at the meeting in New York was Alexander Hamilton. His draft bill declared that ‘the people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be ...”

“... London superintendent, wrote in his memoirs that ‘the whore is a bad apple … there is a big brown bruise on her soul, of self-indulgence and selfishness.’ But traffickers and pimps were also vile: ‘the lowest form of animal life on the criminal scale’. This introduced a contradiction into the policing of prostitution. For officers dealing with ...”

“... encounters the first sub-heading, ‘Poems probably by Rochester’, which is followed by ‘Alexander Bendo’s brochure’, and ‘Writings for the theatre’ before branching off into ‘Lost works’, ‘Disputed works’ and ‘Appendix Roffensis’. The resulting format is chaotic; unnecessary rubrics such as ‘Love dialogues’, ‘Love ...”

“... Being Earnest was to open on 14 February. Wilde attended rehearsals, and was persuaded by George Alexander, the actor-manager, who was producing the play and performing in it, to drop the act in which Algernon is almost arrested for debt. This play, too, was a huge success, with both critics and audiences. ‘Oscar Wilde,’ the New York Times ...”

“... to be a man of images. (In a story called ‘Line and Colour’, Babel contrasts the idealism of Alexander Kerensky, who refuses to wear glasses because he prefers colour to line, to the hardheadedness of Trotsky, who never takes his glasses off for a minute: colour is always an expensive commodity.) The Jewish American creators of the early superhero comics ...”