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“... not even be concealed from the Labour Party. ‘If you can do that for armaments,’ said A.V. Alexander, ‘you are going to have great difficulty in persuading the working men of the country that it is a wrong policy to borrow for real assets in public works.’ But that was a calculation about electoral credibility, not financial confidence, where ...”

“... and the League of Nations, not to mention missionary fervour) was spreading the message that Alexander the Great had conquered the Persian Empire in order to establish the Brotherhood of Man. CAH V, too, was indelibly marked by the era that produced it. Its subtitle was ‘Athens 478-401 bc’, and its cover bore, embossed in gold, a reproduction of the ...”

“... the strain. Is there enough inherent strength in ‘the sinews of the Russian state’, to use Peter Reddaway’s phrase, to sustain the free and democratic political life which its leaders advocate, and of which there are some signs? The answers Richard Sakwa and Alexander Yakovlev give to these questions are ...”

“... dropped the chapter on clubs altogether in his third edition, published in 1971.The title of Seth Alexander Thévoz’s new book suggests a return to Cobbett’s world rather than Sampson’s. His focus is also on Pall Mall, though he ventures occasionally into the empire and more hesitantly into working-men’s establishments (but never into the sporting ...”

“... with a short biography, in the recently reissued In ‘Vanity Fair’, by Roy Matthews and Peter Mellini).* When she was 20 she was painted by G.F. Watts, who was besotted with her and called her his Bambina. At the height of her notoriety she was caricatured in Punch and elsewhere. In her last days she had a deathbed photograph taken of herself, all ...”

“... of India seemed to come from France. In Egypt in 1798, Bonaparte studied the campaigns of Alexander the Great. He had corresponded with Tippoo Sahib, the Sultan of Mysore, and talked of leading the French expeditionary force on to conquer the British possessions in India. In 1800, the Russian Empire’s frontier was still a long way from that of ...”

“... a Battenberg prince related by marriage to the British royal family; and a fifth the future King Peter of Serbia. (Nicholas’s son, Prince Mirko, is aid to have been the inspiration for Danilo Danilowitsch in Lehar’s The Merry Widow. Nicholas’s support for the insurrection against Ottoman rule in neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1870s inspired ...”

“... selling tickets for a benefit concert which starred the cast of Beyond the Fringe. At the gig, Peter Cook performed his Harold Macmillan routine, comparing the four-minute warning before a nuclear strike to Roger Bannister’s mile record (‘I’d like you to know that in this great country of ours a man can run a mile in four minutes’). In August I ...”

“... Diaghilev ballet’. The influence of the Ballets Russes went much deeper than décor, however. As Peter Jacobs writes, it supplied a model of ‘a pagan liberty and a savage beauty, combined with a stylised severity or formal purity’, a liberty and a beauty embodied, one might add, in Nijinsky’s legs, to gaze on which Keynes briefly abandoned his Treatise ...”

“... a New York gallery of Sots Art, an ironic appropriation of ‘socialist’ art by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, into trying to understand the deeper significance of Socialist Realism. This fascinating book swoops and lurches from topic to topic, but the reader’s feeling of disorientation is more than compensated for by the exhilaration of the ...”

“... in Brittany met Geneviève Hamon, who became his companion and collaborator. Through her he met Alexander Calder, Jacques Prévert and the photographer Eli Lotar. He became friends with Eisenstein, Buñuel and Jean Vigo. (The severed and preserved hands kept by the old sailor Père Jules in L’Atalante were sourced and supplied by Painlevé.) Among ...”

“... between them, it lasted almost 30 years and finished Athens as an imperial power. Meanwhile, until Alexander the Great came along, the vast Persian Empire went on very much as ...”

“... fell in with the whaler William Wirt, of Nantucket, near the Pacific island of Juan Fernández (Alexander Selkirk’s lonely home during the years 1704-9), off the coast of Chile. One of the Acushnet’s fo’c’sle crew was the young Herman Melville. The two ships hove to for a few hours while their masters visited each other, and the 22-year-old Melville ...”

“... to be discarded so easily. We cherish what we fear most: Ocean was hard to dislodge. What brought Alexander’s eastward career of conquest to a halt was his confident assurance to his men that they were about to reach Ocean’s shores. When faced by the interminable Ganges plain instead, they mutinied, and small wonder.So Pytheas’ venture required both ...”

“... to get this disorderly province of the mind finally under control and to issue a clear map of it. Peter Reynolds, in his admirable book, cites one such map, from an American anthropologist writing in 1901: 1. The mentality of animals is instinctive rather than ratiocinative, and for each species responds practically alike to like stimuli; 2. the savage mind ...”