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“... Greek on the front and back, and a multitude of tiny bronze gears inside. Using archival sources, Alexander Jones describes in detail the retrieval of the mechanism, which was found in 1900 at the site of an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Antikythera, an island between Crete and the Peloponnese. The ship had been carrying some large statues, which ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Alexander the Great​ was a pioneer of political spin, a master of image-making. He permitted only a single court-approved sculptor, Lysippus, to do his portrait and took a team of propagandists and influencers on his invasion of Asia. On a medallion dating to late in his reign or just after, he appears in the guise of Zeus, holding a fiery thunderbolt – the first time a European monarch minted his own image ...”

“... anonymous committee (though the translation of Jonah has been attributed to Tolkien), directed by Alexander Jones, of a decades-long French project by the (Catholic) School of Biblical Studies in Jerusalem. It is without literary pretension and its literal, plain-spoken minimalism takes one far from the courtly elegance of the King James and into the ...”

“... of the Persian empire (335-23) by the short-lived and ambiguously Hellenic world conqueror Alexander III of Macedon. These extraordinary events – and the Greek writers who, propagandists all, preserved them for posterity – dictated, in definitive and compelling fashion, the triumph, over two millennia of European history, of the Hellenocentric ...”

“... not officially (it’s worth remembering that Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia were the children of Pope Alexander VI). By way of an example: Arthur Balfour was made Chief Secretary of Ireland when his mother’s brother, the Marquess of Salisbury, or ‘Robert’ to his friends, was Prime Minister – hence ‘Bob’s your uncle.’ Here’s a curiosity: Allan ...”

“... breakthrough that makes mobiles possible was the work of D.H. Ring – born, you might think, like Alexander Graham Bell, to make telephonic history – at Bell Laboratories, New Jersey. There are only so many radio frequencies available; Ring’s brilliant notion was to see that the same frequencies could be used over and over again if each covered only a ...”

“... When, in May, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson gives up his role as Tory MP for the Spectator to take over from Michael Heseltine as the editor of Henley-on-Thames, you have to wonder where they’re going to find someone sufficiently blond to be his successor at Doughty Street (from which sturdy address the organ Johnson currently oversees emerges each week ...”

“... Maesa, Heliogabalus’ grandmother, giving up on him in favour of a different grandson, Severus Alexander. The attempts of Heliogabalus and his mother to do away with his cousin failed; eventually the imperial guard took a side and put mother and son to the sword. According to one account, their corpses were mutilated and stuffed into the sewer, but the ...”

“... am, through every fault of my own, as ignorant of Botswana as the average Anglo-American reader of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and its sequels. The novel was first published in 1998 by Polygon. The US edition came out in 2002, and has been very popular. Abacus reissued the novel in Britain this year; it’s been reprinted at ...”

“... in the union flag in 1997, it had been slashed and burned and soiled and made into a frock coat by Alexander McQueen, as patriotic as the Sex Pistols’ version of ‘God Save the Queen’. But now he was dead and couldn’t answer back. The cacophony of harmonious praise threatened to drown out the only thing that was halfway trustworthy, Bowie’s ...”

“... John Vavassour de Quentin Jones, Belloc tells us in his Cautionary Tales, Was very fond of throwing stones At Horses, People, Passing Trains But specially at Window-panes. Like many of the Upper Class, He liked the sound of Broken Glass. To this last line is appended the footnote: A line I stole with subtle daring From Wing-Commander Maurice Baring ...”

“... off his shoes the previous day to paddle and forgotten all about it? It is certainly striking, as Alexander Welsh points out, that even if a jury had never read the novel, they could be expected to know about Crusoe and the footprint. Novels, like life, are full of evidence. It is evidence that suggests the nature of relations, and as Henry James observed ...”

“... The cool, courteous Alexander Kinglake and the hot, contentious George Borrow are two of the best-liked and most influential travel writers of the 19th century. They were contemporaries for much of their long lives (Borrow died in 1881, aged 78, Kinglake in 1891, aged 82) but play very different roles in the 20th-century imagination ...”

“... of the Clifford assignment. Fanny, being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, is a quaint and belated substitute for the Columbia doctorate on 18th-century literature which Ms Jong abandoned in the mid-1960s. There is clearly a market for this kind of thing. ‘Another Lady’ and yet another personage have presumably made ...”