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“... to leave the country in a hurry after some ambiguous financial transactions. Inspired by Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Coubertin needed all his considerable reserves of enthusiasm to overlook the less attractive aspects of the British public schools he visited. The intellectual traveller, and even more so the refugee, lives in a constant tension between his ...”

“... in varying degrees of Brexit: Cameron, Johnson and Rees-Mogg; Zac Goldsmith and Jesse Norman; Alexander Nix, the co-founder of Cambridge Analytica; Nigel Oakes, the founder of its sinister parent company, SCL; Kwasi Kwarteng, the son of Ghanaian immigrants and a King’s Scholar at Eton, who went on to Cambridge and Harvard and eventually became ...”

“... must explain her hazardous use of words. She’d met Sandy, her husband, when he drove one of the Alexander buses about the town of Elgin. She happened to be the clippy on the same bus, and she would often tell me about the beauty of those single-decker vehicles (‘the Bluebird’) and the handsomeness of Sandy behind the wheel. Now she was furious all the ...”

“... and a reproduced Camel cigarette packet: ‘from use’. The full works – chocolate-brown cloth, Brainard dustwrapper, author photo (flat cap, jeans, sandals, thumbs-hooked-in-belt) – yours for £1.50. Shamefully good value. You owed it to the poet to make a decent fist of reading the thing. Now, in an era of cut-throat discounts, peel-away ...”

“... history’ such as those outlined by the American writers David Christian and Cynthia Stokes Brown – or, in the terminology of Edward O. Wilson, in a ‘consilience’, a convergence of intellectual disciplines, humanities with science. Ultimately, all teaching in the fine arts department pays a kind of homage to self-will. First defined in the 15th ...”

“... and ended up, perhaps, ‘fishing and shooting’ on the southern coast of Jamaica, looking ‘as brown as some people of colour’.In the Old World, free movement of labour was at most an annoyance to the ruling class. On the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, it posed an existential threat. In Saint-Domingue on the eve of the revolution, 90 per cent of the ...”

“... exceptions, no crossovers, no poets who manage to be both with and without history? There is one: Alexander Blok, ‘a pure lyricist who did have development and history and a path’. But then Tsvetaeva corrects herself almost immediately. ‘Development’ is not the word she wants. ‘Development presupposes harmony. Can there be a development which is ...”

“... spent their off-season studying the game of the faux-populists, and now have them in their sights. Alexander Clapp Hungary and the Czech RepublicMembership of the EU has allowed several hundred thousand Hungarians to escape by emigration the increasingly punitive conditions of life under Viktor Orbán. One of the most striking features of Hungary since ...”

“... that before there can be solidarity, a little humility would help.Towards​ the end of 1826, Alexander Pushkin was playing chess with a friend who, as he put it, ‘knew a lot of the kinds of thing they study in universities while we were learning to dance’. The friend checkmated Pushkin with his knight and remarked: ‘Cholera morbus is at our ...”

“... Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July 1979 ...”

“... my father had been born. These included Chinese porcelain bowls of pot-pourri, enamel ikons by Alexander Fisher and a life-sized effigy of Horus, the ancient Egyptian god of the sky in the shape of a falcon, whose right eye was the Sun and whose left eye was the Moon. Fashioned out of dark rough stone, this squat and sinister statuette concealed beneath ...”

“... in the Austenesque way (‘to be sensible of something’); refers to Pushkin being in ‘a brown study’ and suffering from ‘the ague’; and mentions that Pushkin and his boisterous mates one night ‘kicked up a terrible bobbery’. This is a big book, but it has a rakish, propulsive air, not unlike Pushkin’s glittering short novels and ...”

“... airport paperback – one has Pity the Nation, another has Harry Potter, another has Dan Brown. But the texts keep morphing into Arabic in front of the readers’ eyes: انجيلينا   Angelina بانانا   Banana تيتيكاكا   Titicaca ‘All the travellers’ books, to their great consternation, are intruded upon by the Arabic ...”

“... of Telegram war correspondents has emerged. Some straddle the divide between new and old media: Alexander Sladkov, a reporter for Russian national TV, whose Sladkov+ Telegram channel is followed by more than a million people; Alexander Kots, military correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda; and Ukraine’s Yuri ...”

“... he does not name them. This is a pity, because as I’ve recently discovered, a source other than Alexander Selkirk’s narrative stirred Defoe’s imagination, and points to the crucial effect which the Battle of Sedgemoor (6 July 1685) had on Defoe and on what is effectively his coded spiritual autobiography, Robinson Crusoe. In a book called The Western ...”