“... 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 ...”

“... of Bouddha … The fierce nomads of Central Asia were changed by it into soft and virtuous men.’ Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, searching for the origins of his Hungarian language, ended up spending many years in a tiny, unheated room in Ladakh, wrapped in sheepskins, translating Tibetan works. (In the 1930s, the Japanese officially recognised him as a ...”

“... the founder of Zionism, in the course of which Witte remarked: ‘I used to say to the late Tsar, Alexander III, “Majesty, if it were possible to drown the six or seven million Jews in the Black Sea, I would be absolutely in favour of that. But if it is not possible, one must let them live.’” Witte’s reasoning was that the Jews were poor, therefore ...”

“... High praise for Velázquez was not entirely new. In 1786 Reynolds described his portrait of Pope Innocent X as ‘one of the first portraits in the world’ – he had seen it more than thirty years earlier in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj in Rome, where it is still to be seen today. In this exhibition it is represented by a copy by Amédée ...”

“... travelled from Dublin to London to finish Gulliver’s Travels, spending part of this period at Alexander Pope’s villa in Twickenham (affectionately known as Twitnam) alongside the poet John Gay. This summer was, Grant claims, ‘one of the most consequential in English literary history’. Not only did the men breakfast on ‘bread and ...”

“... man’s decline and fall, and vented his disappointment in no uncertain terms. Cesare’s father, Pope Alexander VI, had died. That and the withdrawal of French support left him a pricked bladder of indecision and conceit. Every trace of virtu drained out of it, the celebrated handsome countenance which had dazzled so many courts was now permanently ...”

“... letters than when he was younger. The executorship of the James papers had been passed from Alexander R. James to his daughter, Bay James, following Alexander James’s death. Whereas some of her predecessors, at times at Edel’s urging, had limited full access to and publication permission for Henry James’s ...”

“... wrote of ‘Montessori fever’. In Washington, she visited a Montessori school established by Alexander Graham Bell and his wife, Mabel. In New York, she gave a lecture at Carnegie Hall, which sold out; a thousand people stood outside in the street to see her. She was introduced by the philosopher John Dewey. ‘The development at which I aim includes the ...”

“... was one of the great successes of his early Moscow years; his music for Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky was another. On other occasions his sincere attempts to fit the requirements of his patrons worked less well: the problem was that Soviet-flavoured simplicity, coming from a sophisticated European like Prokofiev, could look like sarcasm or ...”

“... Unbound (2010), they rejected James Madison’s scheme of separating powers, siding instead with Alexander Hamilton, who thought that ‘energy’ in the executive was indispensable for ‘good government’. ‘Unbound’ wasn’t supposed to mean ‘unlimited’: Posner and Vermeule argued that ‘public opinion’ would act as the ultimate constraint on a ...”

“... only in the 18th century. In fact, some of the best-known roles for castrati were the alpha males Alexander the Great, Richard I, Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar. Boys were castrated to make them better and stronger singers, not to make them girls. On the other hand, while living in the house of a Russian prince the castrato Balatri ‘gained unheard of ...”

“... Confucianism was ‘transformed into a state ideology’. If we think of Aristotle, the tutor to Alexander, rather than Socrates, say, or Augustine, we have an idea of the way the Confucians situated themselves. Scholars with practical advice to offer could change policy, if they were lucky enough not to be purged, but only at the cost of their intellectual ...”

“... have reformed from them, not against them,’ Browne observes, and deplores abuse of the pope); and in his fidelity to the institutional English Church. It appears also, Debora Shuger has pointed out, in his doctrinal minimalism, whereby no denomination should insist that they are the only true Christians: ‘those who doe confine the Church of ...”

“... for study; these models contained human body parts, and sometimes whole bodies were conserved. A pope had expressly given permission for such uses of the dead, in the interests of knowledge; yet in 18th-century England, Hogarth’s horrific scene of an autopsy (where a dog is lapping up the discarded innards), shows that to be used for science was ...”

“... Lithuania that ‘part of the western Russian Orthodox clergy submitted to the authority of the pope’. The gravitation of the unreformed Scottish Church to French Catholicism was equally unwelcome to Henry, and led, as he saw it, to a break in church history. During the reign of Edward I, ‘the bishops of Saint Andrews and Glasgow were not as they now be ...”