“... too.’Microphones convert sound waves into an electrical signal. They both receive and transmit. Alexander Graham Bell’s unveiling of the telephone at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in June 1876 created an absolute need for such a mechanism. The telephone’s primary weakness lay in its transmitter. The problem was not so much how to capture ...”

“... had a white tie, and money for taxis, I was a convenient escort for Helene at embassies or in the Alexander Platz. My first sharp political lesson came in the course of my term with a Jewish publisher. I found him in tears one morning just after Hitler had taken over: he had had all his books seized – an experience that was to keep me on the left ever ...”

“... to his mother when he thought his father was about to drown. Marghanita Laski, discussing Colin Murray Parkes’s Bereavement in this paper, commented on ‘his perverse avoidance of marital desertion as the obvious analogue to bereavement by death’, and added that in the first case the pain is ‘made worse by the knowledge that all the misery has been ...”

“... because of his Highland ancestry. It wasn’t until the 1960s that radicals like Tom Nairn and Murray Grigor began to satirise ‘the Tartan Monster’ as the product of a false consciousness which excused Scots from contemplating their real past and possible future. Highlandism’s most powerful vehicle was the British Army. Within a few years of the 1745 ...”

“... of Apollo and The Praise Singer, would focus on performers), and the lectures given by Gilbert Murray, the Regius Professor of Greek, which reignited her passion for the ancient world. As other Oxford students became caught up in the General Strike and embraced Moral Rearmament, Mary decided she was a fifth-century BCE Platonist. It was not the last ...”

“... at the triumphs and disasters of Wimbledon and the Olympics. He points out nicely that Andy Murray followed Kipling’s injunction to ‘treat those two impostors just the same’, which is inscribed over the entrance to the Centre Court, by weeping both when he lost and when he won. I share Dixon’s weak – or is it strong? – tear ducts. As he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... period, and periodically feel that Alma Mater has been violated and led astray. In the 1920s Alexander Meikeljohn established an Experimental College at the state university of Wisconsin. Columbia University, a model in some respects for all reformers, was well advanced in its new and successful collegiate curriculum of ‘great’ ideas and ...”

“... as a dance music tool, presaged a host of (mainly European) sound experiments by the likes of Alexander Robotnik, and established the kind of bassline that hits like ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order would later be built on. His influence is still clear on the dancefloor every Saturday night – last year’s big Euro trance hits by ATB and DJ Jean have more ...”

“... baby’s father; whereupon it looks as though Florence did a deal with a man called Albert (Bud) Alexander, that by becoming Claire’s husband and the baby’s father, he also got a job for life. (Florence’s financial control over her daughter, Kraus notes with much perception, ‘was selective and punitive, as it often is in families of means’.) As ...”

“... of racism until the news reports of the Fifties and Sixties confronted them with it. Professor Alexander Bickel of the Yale Law School wrote that television coverage of mob resistance to school desegregation brought concretely home to viewers what the abstract idea of racial segregation meant, ‘Here were grown men and women,’ he said, ‘furiously ...”

“... speaks the exuberant and strangely wooden children’s chorus of the Middle German poet Der Wilde Alexander: ‘Here we ran swilling strawberries/from oak to pine,/through hedges, through turnstiles –/so long as day was burning down’ (‘Children’). He gruffs out a rather Bukowskian Rimbaud: ‘But it was terrific when the house-girl/with her ...”

“... University of Sussex in 1986. But she would like us, she said, to see Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander if we could, and to read ‘The Immortal Story’ by Isak Dinesen, ‘whom I have since discovered has become rather trrrendy’ (a film had just been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring Robert ...”