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“... as ‘the stans’. Though in retrospect the conquest appears rapid and almost inevitable, Alexander Morrison’s study shows that it was in fact the result of a long series of contingent decisions both by central authorities and actors on the ground, driven by a logic of Russian civilisational supremacy.The justification for the conquest most ...”

“... in the system of notation devised by the dancer Vladimir Stepanov and refined by the choreographer Alexander Gorsky, thanks to the efforts of Nikolai Sergeyev, the régisseur of the Imperial Theatres of St Petersburg, who embarked on a Petipa preservation project in 1900. Sergeyev notated the ballets he knew, meaning those from Petipa’s immensely productive ...”

“... this was bad for their music, though a few hold the contrary. Now comes the shocker from Simon Morrison, a Princeton musicologist: Prokofiev wanted to write simple, life-affirming music because he was a Christian Scientist. Sergei Prokofiev, born in 1891 and schooled in St Petersburg, left Russia in 1918 after graduating from the Conservatory. In the ...”

“... but how can we avoid wishing to interpret further the lingering myth of the world-conquering Alexander among these frontier peoples? This is to say nothing of the fact that these folk-tales abound, like all folk-tales, in more or less formulaic elements whose structural role is important, though their literal sense is baffling. Afghan kings seem to have ...”

“... the tensions and problems are simply too great for anyone. This is in part the theme of John Morrison’s efficient and often thoughtful biography, which sets out to show that, contrary to the view held (at least until recently) by many observers and politicians in the West, Yeltsin is ‘squarely in the democrats’ camp’. He reminds us that, as ...”

“... published long before. Of the big five of the 1945 Labour Government – Attlee, Morrison, Bevin, Dalton and Cripps – four have had heavyweight biographies, the most recent of which, Ben Pimlott’s biography of Dalton, is already 17 years old. Furthermore, Dalton’s own more than readable autobiography was completed 40 years ago, and his ...”

“... up the road. Hackney isn’t in the East End – to believe otherwise is, as Harryboy Boas says in Alexander Baron’s novel The Lowlife (1963), ‘the mark of the outsider’. Rather, Hackney is the first step out, geographically and socially, ‘a Victorian-Edwardian suburb swallowed up by London, broad streets, little villas and big tradesmen’s ...”

“... Such questions of distributional justice in London can only sharpen over the coming years.Herbert Morrison, the spiritual father of the Labour right, who led the LCC in the 1930s, is an awkward figure in all this. Hatherley has not come to praise Morrison, but admits that the left’s loathing for him has sometimes led it ...”

“... way.’ From the age of 15, when he left school and a few months later persuaded his father, Alexander Bernstein, to employ him on the film side of his small group of London music halls, Sidney Bernstein has been in the entertainment business. When he was made a life peer in 1969, he took as his motto ‘If I rest, I rust.’ He came from a close-knit ...”

“... at Hugh Gaitskell for not having any medals to wear on Remembrance Day and he loathed Herbert Morrison, his first boss in the wartime coalition, for having been a conscientious objector in the First World War, calling him ‘a dirty little cockney guttersnipe’. Macmillan’s diary is spattered with abuse of other public figures, often tinged with ...”

“... of the passage of historical time: that is, of any disconcerting contrast between the epoch of Alexander I, in which it is set, and of Alexander II, in which it was written. At most, the use of French among aristocrats acts as a generic signifier of difference. Otherwise, we are in a kind of continuous present, a more or ...”

“... Louis XIV for French television. Triggered by an archive clip of his maternal grandfather, Herbert Morrison, another ennobled socialist cabinet minister, Mandelson launched into a memoir of cycling around Hendon, committee room to polling station, bearing leaflets, carrying messages as proudly as the freshly baked loaves in Ridley Scott’s celebrated ...”

“... groans, and Cootie’s muffled ‘Why?’ speak African-American volumes – the ones that Toni Morrison, among others, is striving to write. But the shortcomings of Ellington’s verbal narratives for My People and the Second Sacred Concert (1968) demonstrate that his instincts were sounder in 1928, and that bigger is not necessarily better. The toilet ...”

“... before moving straight on to the Covid pandemic.From the standpoint of the prime minister, Scott Morrison, perhaps looking for a national security scare to lift his approval ratings in the run-up to the elections in May, Russia was unquestionably part of an ‘arc of autocracy’ (an alliterative echo of the ‘evil empire’) of which ...”