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“... and unflinching, and as befits a tragedy the plot is advanced by character. General Sir Harold Alexander, whose reputation Holland aims to restore, was described admiringly by the war correspondent Alan Moorehead: ‘He seemed to have that rare talent of seeing things clearly and wholly at a time when he himself was under fire, and when from all around the ...”

“... sleep more than five hours a night, though in practice they seldom had time for more – but as Alexander Stille’s amazing excavation of their largely hidden history makes clear, the piece mostly erred on the side of understatement, so extreme was the megalomania of the group’s patriarch and his associates.The project began with noble intentions, at ...”

“... Being Earnest was to open on 14 February. Wilde attended rehearsals, and was persuaded by George Alexander, the actor-manager, who was producing the play and performing in it, to drop the act in which Algernon is almost arrested for debt. This play, too, was a huge success, with both critics and audiences. ‘Oscar Wilde,’ the New York Times ...”

“... folk arts and crafts with Art Nouveau stylisations, and a group of young men (Sergei Diaghilev, Alexander Benois, Leon Bakst) now began to see peasant art as falling in line with the new European taste for the exotic and the primitive. The Ballets Russes, arising from an attempt to create a fictive Russian past using artistic techniques that would appeal to ...”

“... are, however, excellent reasons for the obscurity of Apollonius of Rhodes, a poet from the age of Alexander’s successors, one of the first to be born in an Egypt conquered by Greeks. For translators he is a nightmare: Homeric morphology, long sentences writhing with syntactical convolutions and a vocabulary full of archaisms, neologisms and a fair ...”

“... my father had been born. These included Chinese porcelain bowls of pot-pourri, enamel ikons by Alexander Fisher and a life-sized effigy of Horus, the ancient Egyptian god of the sky in the shape of a falcon, whose right eye was the Sun and whose left eye was the Moon. Fashioned out of dark rough stone, this squat and sinister statuette concealed beneath ...”

“... well aware of Wharton’s elegy, but they are not interested in the personage it describes. As the ward of Rochester’s mother, Wharton was brought up in the same house as the poet and, though she was twelve years younger, knew Rochester rather better than we or any other of the commentators on his life may be said to have done. In the months that followed ...”

“... letters than when he was younger. The executorship of the James papers had been passed from Alexander R. James to his daughter, Bay James, following Alexander James’s death. Whereas some of her predecessors, at times at Edel’s urging, had limited full access to and publication permission for Henry James’s ...”

“... Doubtless it was never quite so cut and dried. Skim the sub rosa lit of the time (Robin Cook, Alexander Baron, Colin MacInnes) and you’re plunged into a lost river with discrete but commingled tributaries: gay, criminal, East End Jewish, upper-class drop-out, lower-class dandy; the ‘morries’ of Cook’s dodgy Chelsea set, and Baron’s Harryboy ...”

“... names of Paul Ives, Graham Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan Police Force in the 1960s. Until very recently, it was thought, in-house, to be a legitimate ...”

“... mid-19th century, and the book’s centre-piece is a description of the messy love-affair between Alexander Herzen’s wife and the German revolutionary poet, Herwegh. On a first reading, the book is a brilliant performance, for it treats the affair (and other later ones) with insight and irony. On a second reading, I am not so sure of its quality. It is a ...”

“... leverage is bound to grow. No diplomatic revolution is in prospect. But Russia has ceased to be a ward of the West. How has the change been received there? Reactions to Putin’s regime vary, but they form a certain pattern, falling within a given range. At one end of the spectrum, there is virtually unconditional endorsement of the Russia that is now ...”

“... soldier, the brother of a friend’s friend, who was sent to a hospital in Kyiv. He was put on a ward with men who’d lost arms and legs, and was so traumatised by guilt that his sister found him worse when he was discharged than when he was admitted.One afternoon on Khreshchatyk I saw a slight, pale, bearded soldier in cammos smoking outside a restaurant ...”

“... got to tell me a better story than that”?’The notion of responsible choice was the target of Alexander Payne’s 1996 satire Citizen Ruth, starring Laura Dern as a homeless drug addict who has already had four children taken away from her by social services. It’s a film about a woman’s right to make poor choices. Caught between the opposing sides in ...”

“... Christen, adventuress installed by Powell in Islington as stenographer for Orwell, or Georgina Ward, actress in a belated stage version of his prewar novel Afternoon Men – tell no tales. His friend Alan Ross, editor of the London Magazine, thought that surrounded by promiscuous friends, he may have simply found a vicarious pleasure, productive for his ...”