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“... was on secondment, as they used to say at the BBC. The real deputy editor was Oleg Kerensky, Alexander Kerensky’s grandson. The connection with world history made the thought of the job even more alluring – something to report to my father. The war had been the Listener’s heyday; in the 1940s it had a circulation of 100,000 or more; and, like the ...”

“... she believes, enables her to live life in a ‘higher reality’; and she becomes obsessed with Alexander Herzog, the book’s narrator, when she reads his first novel, ‘avidly, the way you guzzle an elixir’, and assumes he’s someone who could live in that higher reality with her. She cuts his picture out of a publisher’s catalogue and pins it up ...”

“... Doctors (as it is labelled today) which the prince takes to be a portrait of Christ between Saint Peter and Saint John – an intelligent response to the absence of orthodox narrative and to Christ’s apparent age in the painting. By contrast, when confronted by an animated double portrait such as Van Dyck’s painting of the first Earl of Strafford with his ...”

“... of the Observer and the New York Times, captured the now suspended CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, bragging to someone he believed was a potential client that he’d met Trump ‘many times’ and master-minded the entire Trump campaign strategy. Nix implies that those forty thousand votes were scientifically wrested from Hillary and delivered ...”

“... Walker supplies a ‘chronological table’ that correlates authors and titles with events (Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone the same year that Henry James published Roderick Hudson; Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems coincided with Coca-Cola’s adoption of its ‘distinctly shaped bottle’). Still, naturalists have their ...”

“... what happened. Before she left Britain, she had suggested that an agent be dropped into Germany. Alexander Foote was a Yorkshireman, a former coal merchant, chicken-feed sales manager and RAF deserter, who had run off to fight in the Spanish Civil War after getting a girl pregnant. He enthusiastically accepted the offer of a spying job, knowing only that ...”

“... we gleaned from German encrypted messages, but the chief of the SIS dissuaded him. Through Peter Floud, the brother of Bernard Floud, a Party member he had met in the Intelligence Corps, James arranged a meeting with a Russian who seemed to be an embassy official. (Sixty years later, after James’s death, it emerged that this was probably Ivan ...”

“... away from Stoke Newington Road concealed nuclear pockets in the secret history of our culture: Alexander Baron’s The Lowlife (1963), set in a terrace off Amhurst Road, which was where the poet Tom Raworth (‘Raworth is the man in the Island with the word in his mouth’ – Ed Dorn) operated in his Matrix Press days. A few hundred yards to the north ...”

“... English was not very good, so we didn’t see much of the neighbours. Tante Biba and Onkel Peter, the friends from Istanbul, lived twenty or thirty miles away, and with them I spoke German. Then on to Bluefield, the ‘air-conditioned city’, where coal poured in from the bituminous fields. It was here that I started to learn English seriously. I ...”

“... bombing coverage among other matters. More recently, the BBC precipitately withdrew a programme on Peter Wright’s book Spycatcher. Self-censorship has replaced censorship from outside – where the issues at least tend to become known. Self-censorship operates in the dark. Self-censorship also signals a loss of political courage, and lowers the threshold of ...”

“... Jeremy Deller’s 19th-century broadsides and Walker Evans’s Depression-era photographs. Alexander Kluge’s installation for three projectors addresses Marx – and Eisenstein – head on, in a series of interviews and short clips with titles like ‘Lament of the Unwanted Product’, ‘Machines Abandoned by People’, ‘The Magic of ...”

“... level a projection of modern scholarship. Kurke borrows the phrase ‘an elusive quarry’ from Peter Burke’s classic Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe; but the practical difficulties are much more acute for the ancient world, which has not preserved the wealth of play scripts, sermons, ballads and chapbooks on which Burke relied. Even so, to ignore ...”

“... same time Obrist pays homage to serious curators who were not primarily provocateurs: the German Alexander Dorner, who directed the Hanover Museum from 1925 until he was ousted by the Nazis in 1937, commissioned avant-garde artists to design radical exhibition schemes; the Dutch Willem Sandberg, a member of the Resistance, who as curator and director of the ...”

“... his extraordinary intuition of the fatalities in the history of Russian power. The figure of Peter the Great fascinated him, and his first essay at historical fiction, ‘The Negro of Peter the Great’, was based on the career of his own maternal forebear, Ibrahim Gannibal, a black page presented to ...”

“... are, however, excellent reasons for the obscurity of Apollonius of Rhodes, a poet from the age of Alexander’s successors, one of the first to be born in an Egypt conquered by Greeks. For translators he is a nightmare: Homeric morphology, long sentences writhing with syntactical convolutions and a vocabulary full of archaisms, neologisms and a fair ...”