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“... The first time Alexander Masters met Stuart Shorter, he was crouched in a doorway next to the discount picture-framing shop round the corner from Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge: as it happens, the framing shop I used to work for as a sandwich boarder in my teens. Every Saturday the shop owner would hand me a board and a stack of leaflets and I’d hurry down to Christ’s Pieces, a public green in town which was also, I now know, Stuart’s home ...”

“... this distant province with its forgotten glories is beginning to exercise a fascination on its masters. Imagine an ape-man, a Quasimodo. He has picked up a delicate china figurine which has disintegrated in his paws. Now, crooning with concern, his prognathous brow deeply creased, he crouches over the fragments and tries to coax them together again. This ...”

“... put away in Bethlem Hospital, Britain’s oldest lunatic asylum; his portrait of the alienist Sir Alexander Morison stares from the cover of Masters of Bedlam, gauntly silhouetted against a mottled sky. He seems to be looking at something he finds hard to bear. The brief biographies of 19th-century alienists through which ...”

“... lost her seat, as did all the Lib Dems in Scotland bar one. Perhaps the biggest victim was Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury and the other hero of Laws’s account, after Clegg and Laws himself (‘March 2014: David Laws announces fairer funding for English schools’). Alexander was ‘an outstanding ...”

“... 1890s like an evening glove. So, too, did mid-Victorian Glasgow define the professional life of Alexander Thomson. Thomson (1817-75) grew up near to what was fast becoming Britain’s ‘Second City’. After 1800, Glasgow grew fat on the West Indian textile trade, diversifying during the 1830s into heavy industry. The disruptions that followed the start of ...”

“... of the show, has turned the Guggenheim into a ‘Russian Ark’. In his 2002 film of that title, Alexander Sokhurov used the conceit of a promenade through the Hermitage, shot in one long take, to evoke the complicated history of old Russia. At the Guggenheim we spiral up through nine centuries of culture; ‘documents of civilisation’ dominate, but a few ...”

“... of India seemed to come from France. In Egypt in 1798, Bonaparte studied the campaigns of Alexander the Great. He had corresponded with Tippoo Sahib, the Sultan of Mysore, and talked of leading the French expeditionary force on to conquer the British possessions in India. In 1800, the Russian Empire’s frontier was still a long way from that of ...”

“... and Rogier Van der Weyden, which Bermejo often made reference to. Like these early Netherlandish masters, Bermejo used the verisimilitude made possible by new oil painting techniques to blur the boundary between the sacred and mundane. But Bermejo’s art is also distinctive, with sudden tonal contrasts and intense colours that reflect the harshness of life ...”

“... between the Baltic peoples and the German ‘Baltic barons’ who were their social and economic masters from the 14th century to 1918. The German upper class and patriciate did much for the culture of the region, in the architecture of Tallinn and Riga, the schools, universities, music and religion. Wagner composed most of Rienzi while director of the Riga ...”

“... Orwell’s pessimistic ending, in which the pigs become indistinguishable from their human former masters. No matter how often the movie’s screenplay was altered, it always concluded with a successful farmyard uprising in which the oppressed animals overthrew the dictatorial pigs. The Animal Farm project had been initiated when Harry Truman was ...”

“... was kicking Charter 88 into life in various basement flats and leftist magazine offices, Robert Alexander accepted ennoblement as a Tory peer in the House of Lords, though his elevation is not mentioned on the cover of The Voice of the People. He is a former leading QC; former chairman of the Bar; former chairman of the City Panel on Takeovers and ...”

“... and fishermen, influenced his aristocratic, pseudo-Nietzschean vision of a world divided into masters and slaves. ‘Men will be divided into two races,’ he later wrote: To the superior race, which shall have risen by die pure energy of its will, all shall be permitted; to die lower, nothing or very little. The greatest sum of well-being shall go to ...”

“... When Swift, in his Treatise on Good Manners and Good Breeding, insisted that fiddlers, dancing-masters, heralds and masters of the ceremony were greater pedants ‘than Lipsius, or the elder Scaliger’, there must have been readers who asked themselves whether he wasn’t confusing Julius Caesar Scaliger, one of the ...”

“... W.P. Roberts out of his element. He found himself openly flouted by the miners’ leaders, led by Alexander MacDonald and his friends from the professions and the boardrooms. Perhaps the most remarkable part of this remarkable story is the way this apparently indestructible lawyer pursued his campaign in the courts and through the courtroom window through ...”

“... at the very front and in the full light of day, Michelangelo and his companions, the great masters of the modern period from Leonardo da Vinci to the immediate past. The basic arrangement was obviously derived from Vasari’s Lives, published in 1550, although there were some surprising differences in the detailed classification. As a scheme it ...”