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“... again in the Jacobean fascination with death, was that of the relentless mutability of matter – Alexander the Great could be turned in his clay to the bung in a wine barrel. It is a trope that recurs repeatedly in Peter Redgrove’s recent work, You take turns to be food, Before you can grind wheat you have to be ...”

“... now?’The undertakers zipped him into a mauve body bag and took him away. A few days later, Alexander, my older brother, went to the funeral home – all these homes, this last being the least homely – to choose a coffin. He reported that Daddy had been installed in a garage which, it had been stressed, was modified to mortuary standards. We bundled ...”

“... of the show, has turned the Guggenheim into a ‘Russian Ark’. In his 2002 film of that title, Alexander Sokhurov used the conceit of a promenade through the Hermitage, shot in one long take, to evoke the complicated history of old Russia. At the Guggenheim we spiral up through nine centuries of culture; ‘documents of civilisation’ dominate, but a few ...”

“... The Bronze Horseman of Pushkin’s famous poem is Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great in St Petersburg. It was ordered by Catherine the Great (Petro primo Catharina secunda). Modelled on the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, it was meant to evoke the wise emperor extending a main protectrice. Joseph de Maistre commented that one doesn’t know whether this hand protects or threatens ...”

“... pit as it were, not as it was revealed to the audience when the fire curtain went up. Prince Alexander Schervashidze, Diaghilev’s scene painter, who made this enlarged version from Picasso’s little panel, did the job in less than 24 hours, and did it well. You can tell because there is a replica of Picasso’s picture nearby. (Today it would be ...”

“... imaging, gas chromatography and various sorts of microscopy. In 1874, when the collection of Alexander Barker, the son of a fashionable boot-maker, came up for sale at Christie’s, the National Gallery acquired two Botticellis: both long pictures of Venus, one with three putti (An Allegory), the other with four baby satyrs and Mars (Venus and Mars). An ...”

“... account of ‘Russians in 18th-century Britain’. Their profile was modest. Cross started with Peter I’s celebrated visit of 1698. Of around four hundred compatriots who followed in his footsteps, most enrolled as students, although there were also naval recruits, apprentices to shipbuilders and instrument-makers, and others (like British businessmen in ...”

“... together. Elena was now Helen, Mummy not Mami; Papa became Daddy; the boys were still Donald and Peter, of course, but they had far fewer words at their disposal by which to express themselves. They were now British – British refugees, to be exact – not just because their identity documents said so, but because their survival depended on it. And thus ...”

“... Europeans leave off? Can that world be reconstructed, or is it irrevocably shrouded in myth? Tania Alexander is old enough to be Clare Thomson’s mother. Her book begins in 1915 and ends in 1939. She is, on her grandfather’s side, a Benckendorff, a scion of one of the oldest German-Baltic noble families. Through her pages wander ...”

“... and intellectual centre of the Hellenic diaspora opened up by the conquests of his old commander, Alexander. Callimachus was the grandson of a distinguished Cyrenean general as well as a blood relative of the former royal house. The 12th-century Byzantine poet and scholar John Tzetzes made the reasonable claim that, as a young man, and long before ...”

“... Philby, went out in May 1990. The second, Strange Neighbours, about the American spy couple, Peter and Helen Kroger, who acted as a communications link between London and Moscow for Gordon Lonsdale and the Portland spy-ring, went out in November 1991. Both were co-productions, in the sense that the Russians provided their end of the material – they did ...”

“... was kicking Charter 88 into life in various basement flats and leftist magazine offices, Robert Alexander accepted ennoblement as a Tory peer in the House of Lords, though his elevation is not mentioned on the cover of The Voice of the People. He is a former leading QC; former chairman of the Bar; former chairman of the City Panel on Takeovers and ...”

“... She has ‘great media contacts’: her mother is the novelist Sally Emerson; her father is Sir Peter Stothard, the freshly knighted editor of the TLS and former editor of the Times. So who cares about the text? The whole circus could be seen as a pale attempt to follow the transatlantic precedent set by Nick McDonell, the teenage author of Twelve ...”

“... an underling to ‘get to Moscow and make something happen.’ (Browne was later commissioned by Peter Mandelson ahead of the 2010 general election to write the higher education review that opened the floodgates to the marketisation of British universities.)The Soviet Union owned the pipelines through which all Caspian oil was exported, but with Moscow’s ...”

“... a documentary that accused him, inter alia, of being responsible for the poisoning of his friend Alexander Litvinenko, planning to murder the mayor of Moscow, organising the kidnapping of a Duma deputy and funding Chechen terror attacks. After his death I expected more vitriol. Instead the reaction was stunned, mournful. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry ...”