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“... The Committee handles his boarding fees and pays for tutorials with a famous Russian painter, Alexander Pankratov. David is befriended by an art dealer, Guillaume Fleury, who sells on some of David’s ‘Gauguin’ sketches as originals – without his knowledge. The French police discover the fraud just as the Germans are threatening the city, and David ...”

“... Saxon historian Widukind inclined him to think that the Saxons were descended from the soldiers of Alexander the Great. Similarly, some Franks fondly imagined that their people had a Trojan origin. Both Dr McKitterick and Mr Leyser endeavour to see past such images, delusions and sheer propaganda in order to reveal a truer picture of barbarian Europe. For Dr ...”

“... in 63 BCE, his luck ran out. Age had taken its toll. Nearly 70 years old, no longer the young Alexander of his coins and his portraits, Mithridates had long since lost his aura of invincibility. Stranded in the Crimea, the farthest corner of an empire that had once stretched from the Caucasus to mainland Greece, he was powerless: his treasuries were ...”

“... Is Born’), so we could refer to famous Greeks as ‘He Who Loves Horses’ (Philip), ‘Masters (with) Horses’ (Hippocrates), ‘Flat-Nose’ (Simon), ‘Stocky’ (Plato), ‘Famed as Wise’ (Sophocles). Like Anglo-Saxon names, Greek names are either dithematic, composed of two elements: aristo (‘best’) and boulos (‘counsel’), Hera (the ...”

“... discovery that the earliest students of Copernicus’s work learned by transcribing notes made by masters such as Reinhold into their own copies of De revolutionibus. One such copy, formerly in the library of Tycho Brahe, is now in Prague. It contains many annotations and analyses not in Reinhold, and it was formerly assumed that Tycho, who had spent his last ...”

“... slaves – they followed their own trade but nothing they earned belonged to them – and their masters for the most part believed that too much education might turn them into rebels. But Nikitenko was to become a professor in St Petersburg, a literary critic and member of Government commissions. The turning-point came in 1824, when he gained his freedom ...”

“... questions. The key text so far in this debate is Anachronic Renaissance (2010) by the Americans Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood. It seems counterintuitive that the case for ‘anachronic’ thinking would be launched in a study of the Renaissance, for it was then that the ideas of the artist as great original and the artwork as absolutely unique first ...”

“... had an understandably difficult time getting beyond Talleyrand’s plotting with Metternich and Alexander I against France during wartime, and his engineering of the hapless Bourbons’ return to the throne in 1814. The 20th-century Sorbonne potentate Georges Lefebvre famously called Talleyrand one of the ‘most despicable characters in the history of ...”

“... in exchanges of opinion, particularly on political topics. He remarks that he agreed with General Alexander Haig’s political opinions when he met him, but he otherwise leaves imprecise and undecidable topics out of the account. The exhilaration of reading him comes from his own communicated enjoyment of his very honourable batting average, and his related ...”

“... He tried his hand at writing plays, but quickly gave up. He travelled to Berlin, where he met Alexander von Humboldt and Bettina von Arnim, and then on to Paris, where he intended to make a study of lizards, but found himself drawn more to the Louvre than the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle.In 1840, he returned to Lombardy. The region was growing ...”

“... Society and to the British Association for the Advancement of Science – is not a substitute. Alexander Robertus Todd, Baron Trumpington, was the son of a responsible white-collar employee of a railway company who later became managing director of a substantial department store in Glasgow. Todd describes him as an ambitious and hard-working man who went ...”

“... have been much more welcoming to younger scholars, thanks mainly to the friendly attitude of Alexander James, the present literary executor. Many bestridees seem to have continued to assume that the Colossal labour has done it all, but a few have emerged from the shadow and achieved some stature of their own: Jean Strouse in Alice James: A Biography ...”

“... thought should be in the air; an aroma of the personality.’ This is certainly true of his Cicely Alexander and Carlyle portraits, and one is astonished that Roger Fry could have said that his painting ‘lacked humanity’ and could see no more than pure abstract design in the mountainous and disturbing outline of the overcoat and hat in the Carlyle. Where ...”

“... biography of Bruce to have been published in over two centuries. The first, by the Orientalist Alexander Murray, which is included in the second and third editions of Bruce’s Travels (1805, 1813), is brief but important, revealing discrepancies between Bruce’s original notebook and his subsequently published narrative. The second, much ...”

“... taking meals on his own at irregular hours, and napping at his desk when he was tired. His masters might get exasperated with his serene self-absorption, but he continued to bring credit to the house through his reputation as a philosophical virtuoso, and they still valued his opinions and took pleasure in having him at their elbow as a personal ...”