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“... the degree of gravity that Presidential misdeeds must reach before they become impeachable. But Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist Papers, suggested that impeachable offences must always involve ‘the abuse or violation of some public trust’ and result in ‘injuries done immediately to the society itself’. So how could the impeachniks justify ...”

“... Russia had been reconstituted from the ruins of the Soviet Union, the Russian Vice-President, Alexander Rutskoi, wrote in tones of patriotic despair about the queues for Moscow’s first McDonald’s, on Pushkin Square: the death of his country’s culture was taking place in the square named after its most famous poet. That people, not all of them ...”

“... men, most of them clothed in traditional sharwal khameez and jaunty turbans. ‘Now and then,’ Robert Byron wrote in 1933, ‘a calico beehive with a window at the top flits across the scene. This is a woman.’ Contemporary Kabul is closer to Byron’s description than to a 1977 guidebook’s city of ‘mini-skirted schoolgirls’. The schoolgirls are now ...”

“... People’s Party – had been on the staff of Army Group E in Greece, commanded by General Alexander Löhr, himself executed by the Yugoslavs for war crimes in 1947. Personal smear campaigns are not in the tradition of Austrian politics. Also, the Socialists knew perfectly well that stirring the pot of Austria’s murky Nazi past was unlikely to ...”

“... recall, he was full of exhortations about art and entertainment and stories about his best friend, Robert Redford, who had starred in his latest film. His second home, he told me, was in Utah, near Redford’s. He got there by aeroplane, his own, of course, which he also piloted. ‘I’m confident we’re going to have something good,’ he said at the end of ...”

“... the spark. And there is a new roll of honour containing those – Hélène Carrière d’Encausse, Robert Conquest, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Pipes – who did see the fuse peeping out from the foundations and said as much. Indeed, a whole issue (Spring 1993) of the conservative US journal National Interest was largely devoted to a celebration of the ...”

“... for which society cannot find a use. In 1829, an Oxford-trained barrister called Sir William Robert Grove found a new way of making electricity: he trickled oxygen and hydrogen gases over a pair of electrodes and produced three things. One was heat. The second was water. The third was electricity. There were no moving parts to the instrument, and no ...”

“... because it presented ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’ (to quote Alexander Pope)? Or was it, perish the thought, a ‘quotation’ for the simple reason that it had appeared in earlier books of quotations, and so could be ripped off by buccaneers like Bartlett?The preface to the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary in 1979 ...”

“... of a famous “academic career”’ and for a while could find nothing else. He was rescued by Alexander Gerschenkron, an émigré from Russia who had met him at Berkeley, been impressed by his expertise and command of languages, and asked if he’d like to take charge of research on Western Europe for the Federal Reserve. This was perfect. He and Sarah ...”

“... a secret as an unwanted answer to an uncompelling mystery. Like the most extraordinary couture, Alexander McQueen’s designs, say. You delight in and admire them, gorgeously and dramatically displayed in the videos of professional mannequins on runways, but you don’t want to see them in everyday action, being worn disappointingly as clothes, in real ...”

“... style, published The Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation and when Brown was three, Alexander Pope, who believed that ‘all gardening is landscape painting,’ began work on the house and grounds at Twickenham which he continued to alter and write about for the rest of his life. Gardening of this sort was not only painting, it was also from the ...”

“... government of the day. The OBR was set up to correct that tendency. To run it, Osborne brought in Robert Chote, who had been head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a highly respected think tank which analyses government tax and spending plans and reports on them in a spirit of Cassandra-meets-Scrooge. In June 2010, the OBR predicted that the UK economy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (c.1590), Antony Munday’s two-part Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598) and Jonson’s unfinished Sad Shepherd – remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In George Peele’s Edward I, the Welsh bandit Prince Lluellen and his followers give their cause a veneer of mischievous ...”