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“... that it succeeded at Lenin’s expense, a triumphant negation of Lenin’s success. Back in 1984, Michael Scammell wrote a fine warts-and-all biography of Solzhenitsyn which was forced to end on a note of uncertainty. Had Solzhenitsyn blown his great international success of the 1970s by retreating into angry exile in Vermont to write a multi-volume epic of ...”

“... in 2005 to act as trustee, with directorships given to two royal family officials (Alan Reid and Michael Stevens) and, most recently, the duke of Buccleuch, Scotland’s second largest private landowner. The Balmoral estate has been valued at £80 million – assets include the 167-room castle, 81 residential properties, commercial forestry plantations, a ...”

“... line to Putin … he would not be making a regular spectacle of himself,’ the military analyst Michael Kofman, recently returned from Bakhmut, said in a podcast. ‘The reason he’s doing it is because he’s very desperate and he’s trying to get Putin’s attention by speaking to him this way, the way I would say some years ago I used to see people on ...”

“... also oriented us when we were lost. A small image has remained with me: debris over the grave of Alexander Hamilton, the great champion of New York, in the old cemetery of Trinity Church near the WTC. While Thomas Jefferson waxed pastoral about an agrarian America, Hamilton insisted on the cosmopolitanism of the city as the wellspring of the nation. To see ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... level of translation is high). There are also whole poets new to me, like the 16th-century Scot Alexander Hume, who can achieve a small intense uncanny radiance: The ample heaven of fabrik sure In cleannes dois surpas The crystal and the silver pure Or clearest poleist glas. The same so tranquill is and still That na where sail ye find Saif on ane high ...”

“... possibilities for a negotiated peace. President Belaunde Terry of Peru, with some help from Alexander Haig, had advanced his proposal that both sides should withdraw (the British landings had not yet taken place), that a third party should temporarily administer the islands, and that a settlement should be reached within a fixed time-limit. The matter ...”

“... was a junior engineer for the Army Signal Corps and married to Ethel.In 1999, Julius’s handler, Alexander Feklisov, published his memoirs over the objections of the Russian intelligence service. He was a decorated Hero of the Russian Federation, credited in Moscow with having helped resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis: he figured they’d let him get away with ...”

“... the help of a book like Gareth Peter’s My Daddies!, Mel Elliot’s The Girl with Two Dads or Michael Joosten’s My Two Dads and Me – never mind that they’re intended for a younger age group. Time to consolidate their sense of themselves. Instead he reads to them about the early life of the Buddha. Better that they should learn detachment than be ...”

“... impressive book, Shakespeare Restored, challenging what he saw as the errors and complacencies of Alexander Pope’s 1725 edition of the works, and offering many examples of his own editorial skills, particularly in the elucidation of difficult or corrupt passages. So his exalted claims for the provenance of Double Falsehood seemed to carry some weight. But ...”

“... year – of all major US assistance programmes. Invading Afghanistan is easier than running it, as Alexander of Macedon’s heirs, the East India Company and the Red Army discovered. As Vladimir Kuzichkin wrote in Inside the KGB in 1990, the USSR had hoped for ‘the rapid liquidation of the "primitive” partisan resistance, followed by withdrawal from ...”

“... 1960s, a café on the island of Capri. She was doing the Times crossword. Greene and his friend Michael Richey came in from Mass at the church across the square and she overheard them at a nearby table fumbling for a line of Robert Browning’s ‘The Lost Mistress’:Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?May I take your hand in mine?Mere friends are we ...”

“... at the barber’s) about The Way to the Stars with the young Jean Simmons, and the making of Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale, and the first Royal Command Performance, another Powell film, A Matter of Life and Death.Suburban cinemas were often pretty comfortless places. While the entrance could be quite imposing, with the box-office generally at the ...”

“... President or Prime Minister or Secretary of State saw himself as another Bismark or Napoleon or Alexander. Naturally, the result was disaster, and of course the disaster could have been averted and turned into a triumph if the hapless statesman had been a better historian, or, more to the point, if he had been either Neustadt or May. The megalomania of this ...”

“... the station.’ And there is one thing more: ‘We will employ experts to reinstate the name of Mr Alexander Fallon on the plaque, previously identified as unnamed victim.’ Fires, rail crashes, bombs and blitzes: the mainline stations, unconsciously, have become our museums of melancholy. With the passage of time, monuments lose their original function, of ...”