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“... prospect opened when Leopold’s sister Julia married Constantine, the younger brother of Emperor Alexander I: but that, too, turned sour in separation and divorce the ci-devant Grand Duchess featured occasionally as ‘poor Aunt Julia’ in her niece Victoria’s correspondence. The pride of the Coburg system was always the English connection. The distraught ...”

“... years from private into public hands and back again. The telephone was invented in March 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell. Queen Victoria witnessed a demonstration of the new device on 14 January 1878. On 7 April 1882, the Aberdeen Weekly Journal reported that the establishment of a rudimentary telephone system in London had ‘justified the most sanguine ...”

“... Alexander Cockburn​ blamed Ian Fleming for the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars.’ As adjutant to Britain’s chief of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington in May 1941 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the old Penguin Classics cover for The Great Gatsby. The far end of this group is presided over by Alexander McQueen, in a huge image blown up to fill a 12 foot archway. The designer most closely associated with the resurgence of British fashion in the last twenty years broods with cigarette and skull like a troubled Hamlet to Vivienne Westwood’s fairy ...”

“... the story and discredits the storyteller. Oliver Stone is denounced as a power-mad Hollywood baron, a crude, vulgar film-maker who will stop at nothing to coerce or pander to his audience. (‘I think people who sell sex have more principle’ – George Lardner, Washington Post, 19 May 1991. Lardner, who covers national security issues for the ...”

“... fame and fortune, and even a Bohemian knighthood: he is henceforth Sir Edward Kelley of Imamyi, ‘Baron of Bohemia’. (This ‘Imamyi’ is a mysterious and probably fictitious Irish name: he claimed descent from the noble ‘house of Imamyi in the county of Conneghaku’ – the latter is presumably a Bohemian version of Connaught.) In a letter of July 1590 ...”

“... a Jazz Age aviator in cravat and huge round goggles; a hairless albino with two heads; a dapper Baron de Charlus-style boulevardier; a shiny and querulous-looking Buddha. Not all the pictures show her, it should be noted, in cross-sex or hermaphroditic guise: in three outdoor photographs, she is seen from above, supine on a beach mat, wearing what appears ...”

“... officer, was said to have wanted the title ‘Lord Lebedev of Moscow’ but had to settle on ‘Baron of Hampton and Siberia’.The wilfully anachronistic architecture of the British state has served to obscure the extent of its political capture by oligarch money. The former Conservative energy minister Greg Barker and the onetime Labour attorney general ...”

“... comic monster into something closer to, if never altogether becoming, a credible human being, the Baron de Charlus. This gallery does not, of course, exhaust the population of the novel. But characters who escape such treatment pay a penalty: they remain curiously blank. Famously so in the vacant mystery of Albertine, but in large measure true also of Swann ...”