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“... it. The Athenians guarded their citizenship like dragon’s treasure, and the kings who succeeded Alexander had subjects not citizens. This fixity of citizenship, its exclusivity, formed the hard core of their self-identification. To have two patriae, to be a Roman and also an Athenian, a Gaul or a Samaritan, was only made conceivable by the Romans, who ...”

“... wife remarked over dinner that she’d quite like to work for the Chinese communists. Their son Michael was born in February 1931 (named after Michael Gold, an American communist acquaintance who was once told to go fuck himself by Ernest Hemingway, whom Gold had called out for class treachery). They moved to a spacious ...”

“... from black radio and the church to academic journals. Its most articulate exponent was Michelle Alexander, a professor of law and civil rights attorney who had at one time considered the comparison between Jim Crow and mass incarceration ‘absurd’. In her study The New Jim Crow (2010), she argued that the new version differed from the old only in ‘the ...”

“... mere sound suffices: stegê, Dio Chrysostom’s term for the roof of Pindar’s house that Alexander forbade to be burned, ‘at least resonates’ with Latin textum. Why not with Welsh teg, ‘beautiful’, or Turkish tek, ‘single’, or the Dutch island Texel – not to speak of tecknê, which at least is Greek? Neither Pindar nor ...”

“... On the last day of January 1919, the Soviet New Year, the poet Alexander Blok smashed up his father-in-law’s desk. ‘Symbolic action’, Blok recorded pithily in his diary. Michael Gordin’s book helps to explain the action’s symbolism and its violence. Blok’s father-in-law, the desk’s first owner, was the greatest of Russian chemists, Dmitrii Mendeleev, who died in 1907 at the age of 73 ...”

“... Bruce took the throne in 1306 after a long period of wrangling over the succession. The death of Alexander III in 1286 without surviving issue and the subsequent death in 1290 of his young granddaughter, Margaret, Maid of Norway, while she was being brought to Scotland, left no clear heir and the kingdom plummeted into political turmoil. The main competitors ...”

“... to have been participants or contemporary observers, or at least infants, in 1956. Except for Michael Korda’s lively memory of an Oxford undergraduate jaunt, they are historically serious and not only recollect but analyse emotion in tranquillity. Victor Sebestyen’s Twelve Days is well documented, based on up to date knowledge, and vividly ...”

“... went one better and procured the body, according to Macintyre, of a down and out Welshman, Glyndwr Michael, a 34-year-old vagrant found dead in January 1943 in an abandoned warehouse. Michael had either intentionally or mistakenly drunk a concoction called Battle’s Vermin Killer, which contained white phosphorus, a toxic ...”

“... and the need to see further into things than had been managed within Enlightenment philosophy. Alexander von Humboldt, Goethe, Humphry Davy all loom large. In an essay on Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities, Jeremy Adler makes an important contribution to the literary discussion of doubles. Goethe, that true pagan, describes two doubles. In the one ...”

“... In the wall-month of November 1989 I translated two pieces from an anthology of East German writing for the magazine Granta, which in the end didn’t use either of them. (These things happen.) One of them was by Christa Wolf, an extract, I think, from her book Sommerstück. It was just two pages long, nothing more than a preamble and image, but of a Shakespearean power and amplitude ...”

“... on socialism, Richard Crossman’s Bagehot, would hardly have come out of Whitehall, and Michael Manley would not have found time to write a history of West Indian cricket which encompasses the social, economic and regional problems of the Caribbean if he had been engaged in trying to resolve them in their present manifestations. There is no way of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Europe, and one of the supposed critical moments was the 16th-century Reformation, which is where Alexander Murray’s Suicide in the Middle Ages comes in. The present descriptive volume is the first of an opus tripartitum. Here Murray offers the corpus of evidence, both narrative and legal, for the five hundred or more medieval suicides he has found; the ...”

“... was announced with distaste by the family butler. Her long liaison with the darkly romantic Alexander Kerensky, which began in cloak-and-dagger circumstances in New York, was only one of many points at which her lifeline touched major public events; two of the last (she died a few months ago aged 89) were her help in the exposure of her erstwhile friend ...”