“... including members of the newly founded Royal Society, attended to the puzzle of African skin. Robert Boyle devoted a chapter of his Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours to ‘the Cause of the Blackness of those many Nations, which by one common Name we are wont to call Negroes’. Boyle referred to ‘true Blackness’ as a ...”

“... wants to be William Wallace.’ ‘No,’ Martin corrected him. ‘Alex Salmond wants to be Robert the Bruce.’ Wallace has been cast as ‘the people’s champion’, a role he played in the 1975 novel The Wallace by the prolific Nigel Tranter and, twenty years later, in Braveheart. But Martin was right that the appeal of Bruce would be significantly ...”

“... AN ENVELOPE (WHITE) CONTAINING ANOTHER ENVELOPE (RED) CONTAINING A LIST OF 9 PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE (UNNAMED) WITH INSTRUCTIONS (ENGLISH)] Funded by your tax dollars vile fire pushes by day and night to break out! I’d never send you vile fire itself I want you to know! Homosexuals always mumble but their saddles are silver! Don’t open ...”

“... comparison and sheer speculative fun. There are descriptions in Richardson’s psychoanalysis of Alexander, Napoleon and Lawrence that constantly invite comparison with the parenthood, behaviour and personality of Montgomery. Of Alexander, Richardson writes: ‘Throughout his life he was capable of acts of ...”

“... King Wenceslas’ (by J.M. Neale), followed by ‘Once in royal David’s city’ (Mrs Alexander); ‘All things bright and beautiful’ (also Mrs Alexander) is less familiar than it used to be, but was once possibly the best known of all. The most famous American poem of the Victorian age is ‘Away in a ...”

“... it strange to read an entry headed ‘Anomie’ that made no mention of Emile Durkheim or of Robert Merton. ‘Anomy’ is declared obs. by the OED but the French variant anomie stands for a sort of sociological deficiency disease: it refers to the ‘lost’ and rootless state of an individual or community that lacks norms of behaviour and behavioural ...”

“... results. Neither, however, enjoyed fighting for its own sake, as Caesar did, or Napoleon, or Alexander, or Stonewall Jackson, by far the most talented commander of the American Civil War. To them it was – or became – like a drug, an addiction that could not be given up. Had he lived, Alexander might have invaded ...”

“... The cool, courteous Alexander Kinglake and the hot, contentious George Borrow are two of the best-liked and most influential travel writers of the 19th century. They were contemporaries for much of their long lives (Borrow died in 1881, aged 78, Kinglake in 1891, aged 82) but play very different roles in the 20th-century imagination ...”

“... As he lay dying​ Alexander Litvinenko solved his own murder and foresaw the future. A professional detective on his last case, with himself as the victim, he worked out that he had been poisoned in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair, by another former KGB detective, Andrei Lugovoi. He had thought they were partners, investigating the connections between Putin’s Kremlin, organised crime and money laundering in Europe but, he now realised, Lugovoi was still taking orders from the people they were investigating ...”

“... Society and to the British Association for the Advancement of Science – is not a substitute. Alexander Robertus Todd, Baron Trumpington, was the son of a responsible white-collar employee of a railway company who later became managing director of a substantial department store in Glasgow. Todd describes him as an ambitious and hard-working man who went ...”

“... not officially (it’s worth remembering that Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia were the children of Pope Alexander VI). By way of an example: Arthur Balfour was made Chief Secretary of Ireland when his mother’s brother, the Marquess of Salisbury, or ‘Robert’ to his friends, was Prime Minister – hence ‘Bob’s your ...”

“... was once a blunt instrument of the CIA. Arguably, there’s only so much damage one can do with a Robert Frost interview, but that didn’t stop the late Peter Matthiessen, one of the founding editors, from now and then leaving the office, or the Himalayas, to spy on supposed enemies of the United States. Matthiessen later said he had used the magazine as ...”

“... to conquer the world and the ambition to leave no desire unfulfilled. He was often compared to Alexander and could also be seen (like Vathek and various other imaginary despots) as a Faustian figure. Marlowe was not the only writer to admire Tamerlane’s swagger. Nicholas Rowe’s play Tamerlane, first produced in 1701, is now more or less forgotten, but ...”

“... for the Roman imperial hauteur of his manner), who answered to the British General Sir Harold Alexander, who answered to Winston Churchill. The whole Allied campaign in Italy – later criticised as the most irrelevant and most incompetently wasteful of human lives in the Second World War – was Churchill’s brainchild, insisted on in the face of deep ...”

“... lords and religious blackmail by demagogic preachers, could look to all sorts of advantages. As Alexander Murdoch points out, it was ‘parity’ with England, not assimilation to the English governmental machine, that the top-brass Scots wanted. At intervals, they would speak of the need to ‘compleat’ the Union, by which they meant not the Anglicising ...”