“... shape of ‘John Cabal’ (Raymond Massey in Bernal-like make-up), appeared as the protagonist in Alexander Korda’s 1936 film of H.G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come. And, though he was living proof that there is no basic division between art and science, nobody in the suspect culture of science was a more obvious target for the sour provincialism of ...”

“... commissioned his son Allan to investigate the family’s claim to the Scottish estate of General Robert Melvill, a relation of the Earl of Leven and Melville. In 1818 Allan met the Earl, who enlightened him, as Mr Bennet failed to do with Mrs Bennet, as to the nature of an entail, but gave him an ‘engraved Portrait of the first Earl as a sacred ...”

“... are legendary, and often attributed to some character flaw, to paranoia or arrogance. Robert Dallek in Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power situates their deceitfulness within a broader transformation of diplomacy, where the line that separated foreign and domestic policy, always unclear, was practically erased. Dallek’s book is ...”

“... were a ‘deadly’ compound of ‘credulity, superstition and fanaticism’. Robert Burton’s visions of religious madness as a satanic pandemic, a commonplace in Tudor and Stuart England, seemed increasingly incomprehensible to those ‘rational’ 18th-century Christians unconvinced of direct divine (let alone diabolic) intervention in ...”

“... with an average annual rainfall of under 20" it was certainly dryish. On the other hand, Professor Alexander Agassiz (son of the more illustrious Louis) had suggested that rainfall increases as cultivation and building disturb the electrical currents in the surrounding atmosphere, while Hardy W. Campbell, billed in the Milwaukee Road pamphlets as ‘the noted ...”

“... in any case Calvin never wanted for it. Alastair Duke on the Netherlands, Henry Cohn on Germany, Robert Evans on Eastern Europe, Patrick Collinson on England are all as alive to the limits as to the extent of Calvin’s influence on churches which drew eclectically from a range of Protestant and Humanist thought both native and foreign, and which were more ...”

“... honest account of it puts it in a good light; he miraculously manages to compare Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson with Gay to the latter’s disadvantage. Henderson is certainly not concerned to minimise the Scottishness of the ballads, but he does emphasise how close formal ‘ballad Scots’ is to ‘ballad English’, and he remarks that ‘Scots folksong ...”

“... which only seems disjointed because it is so new. So distinguished and fascinating a figure as Alexander Goehr has publicly admitted that he began as a composer using 12-tone techniques because it seemed easier. I’m sure he speaks for many. But the point is that a Goehr frets at, exploits and transcends limitations of this sort, to produce original and ...”

“... Italian city. Hardly a minnow can have slipped through the net, though it has landed one whopper: Alexander Trippel, who was Swiss and described by a German in 1782 as ‘the greatest sculptor in Rome, that is to say the world’, is included as if he were an obscure British artist known only because he exported a relief and a portrait bust. This slip is of ...”

“... Robert Lowell​ has a poem called ‘Picture in The Literary Life, a Scrapbook’ which begins:A mag photo, I before I was I, or my books –a listener … A cheekbone gumballs out my cheek;too much live hair.Not knowing the photo of Lowell, I go instead to the picture of Seamus Heaney on the front of the companion volume to this one, New Selected Poems 1966-87, painfully young, worried-looking, Noh-rice-flour-pale, against a dark brick wall ...”

“... At the tail-end of 1892 Robert Louis Stevenson was working on a novel. The book was going well but one thing was bothering him. Serial publication, he felt, might be difficult to secure, since ‘The Justice Clerk’ – it would eventually be published as Weir of Hermiston – was both ‘queer’ and ‘pretty Scotch ...”

“... of Mackintosh came with the publication in 1968 of a study by the Canadian-born architect Robert Macleod, who concluded that he was ‘a last and remote efflorescence of a vital British tradition which reached back to Pugin … With his pursuit of the “modern”, his love of the old, and his obsessive individuality, he was one of the last and one of ...”

“... quo during what turned out to be the last years before decolonisation. Under the labour leader Alexander Bustamante, pressure for Jamaican independence was mounting, and there were anti-colonial demonstrations all over the Caribbean. The RWF had one company permanently stationed in British Honduras, where dissatisfaction with British rule was particularly ...”

“... in electronics, especially in the rapidly evolving hobbyist market. But Wozniak was Apple’s Alexander Graham Bell. In 1975, after Jobs came home from Reed, Wozniak built what some people think of as the first personal computer: the Apple I. He initially wanted to give it away to fellow hobbyists, but Jobs persuaded him to make the venture a ...”

“... who began producing their own versions, and Brewster’s complaints were unavailing. Alexander Theophilus Blakely, a Royal Artillery captain, took out a patent for a rifled cannon in the 1850s. He approached Sir William Armstrong with a proposal to build one to his specifications and subject it to military trials. Armstrong declined, and ...”