“... reputations. Joseph, the pious Bavarian, who had grown up to become Cardinal Ratzinger and then Pope Benedict XVI, appalled the Muslim world and many liberal Catholics by quoting a Byzantine emperor’s insults to the Prophet Muhammad. The Danzig lad, who had become Germany’s best-known writer and a Nobel Prize winner, the scourge of those who kept quiet ...”

“... perineal secretions for the manufacture of perfume. It is not quite the milieu of Fielding or Pope. It was rumoured that he kept a set of ropes and ladders handy should the debt collector come to call. His creditors hounded him, and he was committed to Fleet Prison as a bankrupt. On his release he decided that words were a more lucrative commodity than ...”

“... it could be explained by reference to his known medical condition. That he had taken up the Alexander technique, accounting for his distinctive posture, was not publicised until later. That he wore flat heels might have been noted by a quizzical eye. That he was a devotee of knitting was not a foible widely reported at that time. That Cripps did any of ...”

“... spread across Asia and into Europe by uncertain means. Around 1190 CE, the English poet-abbot Alexander Neckam provided the first written account of the compass in Europe in De naturis rerum. He noted that when sailors sail over the sea, when in cloudy weather they can no longer profit by the light of the Sun, or when the world is wrapped up in the ...”

“... cropped up in British courts in medieval times; that Madame Tussaud was born Marie Grosholtz; that Pope Urban VIII changed the horseflies on his family coat of arms to bees; that mead doesn’t taste very nice; that Alexander the Great may have been mummified in honey, but then again he may not; that honey from bees which ...”

“... and for each patron a map-maker. The most persistent advocate of the Great Southern Continent, Alexander Dalrymple, was convinced that a land-bridge connected Australia either to New Guinea to the north, or to the paradise de Quiros had named Austrialia del Espiritu Santo to the east. On his first voyage Cook was carrying maps by the French cartographer ...”

“... Alexandre Stourdza et l’Europe de la Sainte-Alliance, a study of the diplomat and thinker Alexander Sturdza – father a Romanian boyar, mother a Phanariot Greek – in the era of the European Restoration.2Secretary in his twenties to Ioannis Capodistrias, Alexander I’s Greek envoy to the Congress of Vienna, with ...”

“... dictatorship, with the return of the censor and the secret police. The Russian socialist exile Alexander Herzen, who witnessed the revolution and counter-revolution in Paris, was heartbroken. He recognised that 1848 had left Europe’s ancient order of blindly deferential monarchy in ruins. But what would replace it? In unforgettable words, Herzen ...”

“... Trinity is more gracious in its arrangements. If you want to see a fine Henry Moore and a dashing Alexander Calder adorning a campus, see them in Trinity. It begins to appear that University College has adopted Trinity’s vice, and has become, for quite different reasons, complacent. McDowell and Webb have written the history of Trinity as if it were an ...”

“... most histories it is Alaric’s Goths who storm the city and Attila’s Huns who are deflected by Pope Leo, or by rumours of the plague. It then moves to a review of previous English dictionaries, beginning with Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall of 1604, which explains ‘hard vsuall English wordes’ borrowed from Latin and other languages, some now ...”

“... everybody – is talking about handbags with the intensity of cardinals appointing a new pope,’ an English journalist wrote during London Fashion Week in 2006. (Of course, the ‘everybody’ both Lagerfeld and the journalist are talking about doesn’t embrace those whom democracy hasn’t included in the right to eat sufficiently or be housed or ...”

“... Louis IX under the Treaty of Paris, peace with Llywelyn in Wales, with another brother-in-law, Alexander II in Scotland. The only man with whom he never came to a lasting understanding was Montfort (yet another brother-in-law).In short, nothing could be less like the conventional idea of a pugnacious Plantagenet than the fair nine-year-old child who came ...”

“... of a strangely conflicted career that affected the lives of people as disparate as Lola Montez and Pope Pius IX it would be hard to beat. Hilmes does himself no favours with his subtitle, which is crisper but no more bearable in the German original: Liszt: Biographie eines Superstars. ‘The word “superstar”,’ he writes in his prologue, ‘is likely to ...”

“... Italian city. Hardly a minnow can have slipped through the net, though it has landed one whopper: Alexander Trippel, who was Swiss and described by a German in 1782 as ‘the greatest sculptor in Rome, that is to say the world’, is included as if he were an obscure British artist known only because he exported a relief and a portrait bust. This slip is of ...”

“... Knox before leaving for France, he wrote: ‘I’m going to be rather odd. I’m not going to “pope” until after the war (if I’m alive).’ Volunteering for the war meant that at Oxford, as at Eton, he stayed only half the course, being ‘sent down by the Kaiser’ as he liked to put it. It seems peculiar in retrospect that he should have retained ...”