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“... of their escalating and rather operatic emotions. Ira Ringold – husband, Stalinist and radio star – is driven by ‘five hundred things’, yet he never knows what they are or how they add up. His wife, an ageing actress, hysterically imposes ‘the magnitude of her misery’ on those around her. His stepdaughter provides a ‘first-class education in ...”

“... and showed up in a remote California desert town. Joining a threadbare local band, the incognito star helps to incite spectacular musical innovations and barroom brawls – all of them entirely unknown to his mourning fans. In the end, this story turns out to be the narrator’s fantasy, the invention of a 57-year-old retail store manager who yearns to tell ...”

“... professors in the humanities got some attention but no respect. According to its final editor, Alexander Star, who assembled this anthology of articles, its audience was comprised of academics, ‘quasi-academics’ who worked in university presses, libraries and think-tanks, and ‘non-academics’ interested in the ‘unseemly things’ of these ...”

“... after deserting from the Romanian army when Ceaușescu fell. He got a tattoo of a black star on his throat after he landed a summer job at his first resort on Crete. He’d worked at half a dozen hotels in the Aegean. Radu could sniff coffee beans and tell you which continent they came from. He could trickle steamed milk into a cappuccino in the ...”

“... a younger woman, a pair Andronikos soon identified as the Macedonian king Philip II – father of Alexander the Great, builder of the army and the European empire that gave his son the means to conquer the world – and one of his seven wives. But it was not long before different candidates were proposed, as experts started to examine the evidence. Today the ...”

“... much pot with his childhood friend Adam Jacobs. He is in love with the 1940s movie actress Kitty Alexander, the star of The Girl from Peking. ‘It amazed him that so many people – in fact, it would be fair to say most people – were unaware that the 1952 Celebration Pictures musical The Girl from Peking, starring Jules ...”

“... of the novel merges into sympathetic pain at what it must have cost to be able to write it. Alexander Bogdanov is probably remembered – if at all – as the heretic flayed in Lenin’s great polemic, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Bogdanov’s error, in Lenin’s infuriated opinion, was to deny the materiality of the world, so falling into ...”

“... 1993 carry a ‘Year of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples’ tag. In Washington DC the Morning Star Foundation, which sponsors the national ‘1992 Alliance’, is already celebrating the quincentenary of 1991, ‘the good old days in the old country’. A sunrise ceremony on the steps of the Capitol Mall is planned, along with a concert series and a ...”

“... adored of early movie queens walk out at the height of her career and become a virtual recluse? Alexander Walker treats Garbo as a mystery to which he at last can offer an answer. Indifference to the prize, he says; the same detachment that enabled her, at 20 and just arrived in Hollywood, with little English, to defy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the most powerful ...”

“... drinks in Montparnasse, and settled on the rue de Vaugirard, or near the Orthodox Cathedral of St Alexander Nevsky, or in suburbs like Boulogne-Billancourt. The appeal was obvious: many educated Russians had learned French as children, and Russia had always admired French culture. The penniless émigrés were rarely able to practise their old professions, and ...”

“... from. In any case it’s not a train of events so much as a tangle – like the Gordian knot that Alexander of Macedon had to cut in order to conquer India. Alexander’s desire for conquest is put down to his insistence on holding back his bowel motion. This idea is floated in a comical dialogue from an unpublished play by ...”

“... actually gives us a list of people who wouldn’t talk about his hero: these include Claire Bloom, Alexander Cohen, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, Sir John Gielgud, Hugh Griffiths, Joseph Losey, James Mason, Vincente Minnelli, Mike Nichols, Rachel Roberts, Daphne Rye, Jean Simmons, and three of his wives, Sybil Christopher, Elizabeth Taylor and Susan ...”

“... itself, the nobility is both attractive and alarming. In his biography of the real-life Rochester, Alexander Larman provides a workmanlike account of an improvident life. John Wilmot was born in 1647 on All Fools’ Day. His father, one of Charles II’s most stalwart lieutenants, had fought for the king and fled the field with him after the royalist defeat at ...”

“... starring Bill Murray, which took the piss out of the repetitious and the banal by capturing the star in a time-warp where he was doomed to enact the same day over and over again until he could learn to act his way out of it. Other smart films have been made on dumb subjects, or about apparently dumb people. Rain Man was a masterly study of the idiot ...”

“... remains sedimented in the popular imagination: even the most hardcore sceptic knows their star sign, and recently, it has enjoyed a resurgence among millennials, especially in the United States.Astrology has a claim to be called the first great science. Unlike many other disciplines of antiquity, it dealt in repeatable, quantifiable data ...”