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“... generating large quantities of precise data for the astrologer to interpret.In A Scheme of Heaven, Alexander Boxer links ancient and medieval astrology not to modern newspaper horoscopes, but to data science. The task of astrologers was to draw patterns and narratives out of seemingly incomprehensible details: ...”

“... you may even be glad of a wheelchair yourself.’ Until then, I had gloried in what the crippled Alexander Pope bitterly, and brilliantly, categorised as ‘all the arrogance of superfluous health’. For the next thirty years, there was not a day when I could not get up and do a day’s work. But Quentin made me grateful for every one of them, never taking ...”

“... translation of second-generation Mafia mufti. The business for the aspiring businessman, the boxer in the boardroom. (A high-profile exemplar of this style was the magnate, George Walker; once, according to James Morton, an ‘ally’ of Billy Hill and Eddie Chapman, later a frequently puffed adornment of the Thatcherite open market culture.) There is ...”

“... of a Thessalian aristocrat, spent so much time praising Castor and Pollux (the latter himself a boxer) that his patron paid him only half his fee and told him to seek the rest from the Heavenly Twins. Hamilton knows this story, but does not draw the consequence that a feature of the generic style cannot tell us something about any one exponent unless it is ...”

“... ancients, the white carthorse on the steps of Number Ten is dust with Bellerophon, the horse of Alexander. A cruel memory of that age lingers, the TUC trip to Poland at the height of Party-military repression in that country. It was a jaunt which the EEPTU opposed – violently of course, it never did things otherwise – which Mr Basnett approved and of ...”

“... a Jack London story; it was while working on this that he met Alexandrov, who played an American boxer. But there is little in Eisenstein’s stage designs to suggest he was familiar with Mexican culture: that came later in the 1920s, through Russian literary depictions of Mexico – Ilya Ehrenburg’s Adventures of Julio Jurenito and Mayakovsky’s My ...”

“... on world politics, threatening his enemies and then promising them extravagant pardons. An ex-boxer with no education, he is said, like the late Uday Hussein, to have a taste for personally torturing his enemies. Putin supports the Kadyrovtsy because they do the bulk of his dirty work for him. In most of mountainous Chechnya, they are now at the forefront ...”

“... Chinese leaders had learned many of the American pressure points. Indeed they had. (General Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger are only two of Christopher’s Foggy Bottom predecessors to have franchised their expertise in this way.) Warren Christopher returned to Washington to find that Clinton was determined to dump the ‘linkage’ policy on which ...”

“... great powers were preoccupied with slaughter in the Belgian Congo and the Philippines and with the Boxer Rebellion in China. Part of Wells’s originality was to see these scattered conflicts of the old century as harbingers of a new epoch of world wars. The nightmarish weaponry of a technological age was grotesquely foreshadowed in The War of the ...”

“... might be inclined to argue that his talents were mainly physical. At Oxford he made his name as a boxer. He studied in hectic bursts in the lulls between strenuous debauches (he coined the word ‘hedonist’) and prodigious feats of athleticism. He was forever knocking people down and leaping across rivers. De Quincey, Wilson’s contemporary at ...”

“... in 1940, Olivier and Vivien Leigh went to lick their wounds for a month in Vermont with ‘the Alexander Woollcotts’. The English period equivalent would be a month in the country with the Beverley Nicholses. Holden is sometimes forgetful, evacuating the wartime Old Vic in one chapter to Burnley, in the next to Barnsley, and poor at sums. He gives the ...”

“... from behind a fruit and vegetable stall, giving the gunner no time to shoot him. Sergeant Simon Alexander and Lance Corporal Jack Mizon had been in the only other vehicle and had to treat the casualties themselves since there was no medic with them. ‘Sergeant Wilkinson died straight away,’ Jack Mizon said. ‘Sergeant Black got a piece of shrapnel in ...”

“... flow by; a long night of chaos and desolation will pass. Those resonant, vatic words come from Alexander Herzen, the Russian democratic exile, and he wrote them shortly after the failure of the 1848 Revolutions in Europe. The old empires had reasserted control. But Herzen knew that 1848 spelled their ultimate doom, even though it was not to come for ...”

“... Kremlin connections. In May, Papadopoulos got drunk at a London wine bar and told the story to Alexander Downer, former leader of the Australian Liberal Party and then high commissioner to the UK. In June, Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort held a secret meeting with Russians at Trump Tower. In July, after the hacking of the Democratic ...”

“... the British armed forces ‘punch above their weight’. ‘This was like telling a lightweight boxer he can only hit his oncoming heavyweight opponent by punching sideways … The army embraced the manoeuvre myth for it gave a veneer of plausibility to an otherwise militarily meaningless proposition.’ Both these traits – the upper echelons of the ...”