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“... They have no support from the state.’ Since the crown passed from the exiled Russian aristocrat, Alexander Alekhine, in 1946, only the iconic Bobby Fischer has wrested it from Russia. Chess is now practised by ominously boring people (like me) who recall classic encounters from centuries ago (Russell’s favourite is the so-called Pearl of Wijk aan Zee, a ...”

“... be remembered for his criticisms of nuclear weapons and his proposal that the USA should rely on Star Wars to protect itself. Furthermore he has now signed the most far-reaching arms-control agreement yet negotiated with the Soviet Union. But Vidal apparently enjoys provoking the wrath of the Administration almost as much as he enjoys re-creating the ...”

“... from one clan grave to another while the present Stuart claimant to the throne, Michael James Alexander, was being interviewed by BBC Scotland. He is a gentle Belgian socialist who once worked as a waiter in Edinburgh but has taken up PR. ‘I felt it was important to attend,’ he told the cameras. ‘Ethnic cleansing was carried out after Culloden and ...”

“... Edric’s fascination with lives on the margins makes Gurney a logical choice. As a poet, his star has spent decades slowly rising. Two collections, Severn and Somme (1917) and War’s Embers (1919), were greeted with a courteous near-silence that ensured the rejection of his third. Born in 1890, Gurney was the son of a Gloucester tailor. He won a ...”

“... of the Observer and the New York Times, captured the now suspended CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, bragging to someone he believed was a potential client that he’d met Trump ‘many times’ and master-minded the entire Trump campaign strategy. Nix implies that those forty thousand votes were scientifically wrested from Hillary and delivered ...”

“... to teach me to keep quiet. One’s legs often got felt up as a child. Dad’s old headmaster, Mr Alexander, used to give us lessons in algebra and he was a great stroker and clutcher, though only of the legs and not the parts appertaining. Vicars did it too, without seeming to want to take it further. It was something I came to expect, and just another of ...”

“... its best hotel. Since he worked very much in concert with his two principal competitors – Alexander Clifford of the Daily Mail and Christopher Buckley of the Daily Telegraph – this was something they normally achieved, although at times they went one better by occupying the former enemy commander’s former villa. He was lucky enough, in fact, to ...”

“... in the whole of Russia). Naturally the family was anti-Bolshevik, and equally naturally, the young Alexander was fed Bolshevik heroism and Revolutionary fervour at school. The resulting social tension Solzhenitsyn himself regards as having conditioned his entire development; it caused him to subordinate the values of personal life to those of public ...”

“... and her male counterpart, Cross Sugarman; Darden Pittard, ‘our class’s cool black guy’; Alexander Héverd, from Paris, rumoured to be ‘a druggie’; and Conchita Maxwell, daughter of Ernie ‘the Oil King’ Maxwell and his much younger Mexican cleaning lady. Finally, there are Lee’s roommates: Dede, ‘literally, a follower’, whose obvious ...”

“... after the misogyny she faced for daring to present a BBC2 series without the looks of a film star, and after the OBE, comes the doorstop SPQR to charm the charts and critics both. Beard gives us a sweeping Roman history that’s both reassuringly familiar and abidingly strange. The material matters, of course, and it doesn’t get better than ...”

“... Theodore Sedgwick who came to Stockbridge ‘after the Revolution’, and who was a friend of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington. His descendants (but not, importantly, all of them) are buried, in ‘the Pie’, with their heads facing out and their feet pointing in, towards their ancestor. The legend is, apparently, that on Judgment Day the ...”

“... which gave the Economist the wide-ranging intellectual heft it had hitherto lacked. His star signing was the historian Arnold Toynbee, who wrote a leading article and two or three notes practically every week between 1922 and 1939. But Layton also appointed younger figures, several of whom, such as Douglas Jay, a future Labour minister, and Graham ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Venetian girl’. On that occasion he had been competing in the swim with a bachelor friend, Alexander Scott, and the Cavalier Angelo Mengaldo, a former officer in Napoleon’s Army who claimed to have swum the Berezina under Russian gunfire. Mengaldo took to a gondola long before Venice was reached, and Scott gave up at the Rialto bridge. If Byron’s ...”

“... Arnold Böcklin, two of the first teachers at the painting academy established by Grand Duke Carl Alexander, would later become major artists, but both left within a few years, repelled by the philistinism of local notables and the formality of the court. A generation later the 25-year-old Richard Strauss was hired, but like others before him felt blocked by ...”