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“... for example, not seven; and the students had sung not ‘My country, ‘tis of thee’ but ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. At trial in Alabama the judge found the ad ‘libellous per se’. He instructed the jury to bring in a verdict for Mr Sullivan if it found that the advertisement was ‘of and concerning’ him. It did, awarding him all he had asked ...”

“... had tripped over one of Caroline’s dolls and broken his neck in the White House nursery’ – Alexander Cockburn, the Nation, 6 January 1992. The third argument is micro-historical. It punctures holes in the details, brings up contradictory testimony, offers alternative hypotheses. It tends to trail off into indeterminacy: we’ll never know who did ...”

“... in 1852, became a sensation and may have contributed to the liberation of the serfs in 1861 (Alexander II is said to have claimed it as an influence on his decision). For the rest of his life, Turgenev was the most famous Russian in Europe. His celebrity, but also the novelty of his presence, is reflected in the baffling variety in contemporary spellings ...”

“... doesn’t mean anything to them. A new music video by Shakira – a sexy Lebanese-Colombian rock star whose lyrics reunite Spanish and Arabic – does. This should be a time of hope in Syria. When the old President died three years ago, Syrians sensed the possibility of escape from the deadening, if steady, hand with which he had governed most aspects of ...”

“... a line of young bodyguards wearing headbands sat or crouched watchfully at the edge. A famous film star called Htun Wai, a comfortable looking figure in a lilac jacket and longyi, stepped up to the microphone and introduced Suu Kyi with a vertical flourish of his arm: ‘Daw Aung San Suu Kyi!’ He lowered the microphone six inches and moved to the side. She ...”

“... Mailer’s wingman to be. The stern upholder of heterosexual norms was a later guise. Along with star-spangled kitsch such as My Love Affair with America and neocon tracts such as The Bloody Crossroads, The Present Danger and World War IV, Podhoretz fathered a pair of sequels to Making It, further investigations of the wonder of himself. This was not ...”

“... as ‘a bottle-imp containing miniature figurines dramatising a large bird’s attempt to strangle Alexander the Great with a golden thread, or a bas-relief of a girl extracting from a cushion the doll of a one-eyed dwarf dressed entirely in pink, or a skull engraved with Old Norse runes sporting a lady barrister’s cap made out of pages … from the ...”

“... writer’, and he cut some contributions by more than half. One enemy he certainly made was Alexander Balloch Grosart DD, who was invited to contribute several entries for the first volumes, principally on 17th-century divines. As early as October 1883, Stephen was complaining that he had ‘had my usual letter of abuse from that old fool ...”

“... an anti-government demonstration, and the participants had sincerely held convictions. And yet the star speaker at this rally, supposedly organised to fly the flag of resistance to state oppression, was David Icke.Icke was a BBC sports presenter in the 1980s, smooth, bland and remarkable only for a certain glassy coldness of manner. Before that he’d been a ...”

“... baby’s father; whereupon it looks as though Florence did a deal with a man called Albert (Bud) Alexander, that by becoming Claire’s husband and the baby’s father, he also got a job for life. (Florence’s financial control over her daughter, Kraus notes with much perception, ‘was selective and punitive, as it often is in families of means’.) As ...”

“... hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the weeks and years after her death. The tributes were long, sometimes fulsome, always ...”

“... on poetic subjects or writing poetry? You must have been good at English. You must have been a star at essays.Well, not quite a star. But the masters thought I was pretty good and so I came to see myself in this role. You know – take a look at my sensibility which is surely superior to yours. By all means clatter off ...”

“... train Guevara’s Argentine guerrilla group of 1963-4; and Trotsky’s assassin, Ramón Mercader. Alexander Alexiev, the first Soviet Ambassador to Havana, was also a veteran of the Spanish war. Exiled Spanish Republicans and their families were to spread out over the whole of Latin America, stiffening the sinews of the local Left with fresh recruits whose ...”

“... years later Dos Santos is still in power. Under his supervision, Angola is not just a development star, but a model of elite self-enrichment and wealth disparity. There are now said to be seven thousand millionaires while four million people in the capital survive on $2 a day. Poverty is even more pronounced in rural areas. About eight million Angolans, or 37 ...”

“... trans actor in a mainstream UK soap opera, and Rebecca Root of Boy Meets Girl, the first trans star of a British TV show; or again reports of the first trans adopters and foster carers, or the 100 per cent surge in children seeking gender change, as shown in figures released by the Tavistock Clinic in November 2015. From 2009 to 2014, the number of cases ...”