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“... 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 ...”

“... white rather than the right stuff. The cocaine literature of the era reflected these attitudes: Robert Sabbag’s Snowblind (1976) was a gonzo-inflected account of how one man, Zachary Swan, single-handedly turned southern California onto coke; and while there’s plenty of nastiness in the tale (how could there not be?), the overall impression Sabbag gives ...”

“... this systematically and over a period of time. Some time after Walsingham’s death, his colleague Robert Beale recalled that he had engaged ‘some’ of the secretaries in the French Embassy to betray the secrets of French and Scottish ‘dealings’, which was to say, the convolution at the heart of mid-Elizabethan politics: the question of Mary Queen of ...”

“... relics. It was his breach of this oath that gave William the moral high ground and caused Pope Alexander II to grant his expedition the status of a proto-Crusade, complete with appropriately blessed banner. Wood doubts the whole story of papal benediction, which has no non-Norman corroboration. But what was Harold doing across the Channel in any case? The ...”

“... Charles Dickens, Henry James, Bram Stoker, Ulysses S. Grant, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lillie Langtry, Robert Mitchum and Jean Cocteau were also on the books. Some of their accounts are closed, crossed out with lines of red ink and marked ‘Dead’. Grand Duke Sergei of Russia’s reads ‘Assassinated’. A ‘Sundry Debtors’ list from 1909-41 fills a hundred ...”

“... he had signed. The others were all convicted and sent to jail or borstal. The trial judge, Alexander Karmel, complained that ‘decent citizens’ were afraid to ‘use the Underground late at night … for fear of mugging’, which Hall describes as ‘the first media-recorded judicial invective against “mugging”’.The Oval Four were arrested a ...”

“... behind the scenes in September 2015. The most compelling account is Die Getriebenen by Robin Alexander, a correspondent for the conservative paper Die Welt. He was given intimate access to Merkel’s entourage, and offers an unsparing portrait of the German political class as it struggled to cope with the crisis, largely by refusing to take ...”

“... silver in the age of Web 2.0, Thomson has since added, is open to doubt. But that doesn’t stop Robert Gottlieb from presenting himself, at the start of his new biography, as an unapologetic negative theologian. ‘She’s still hiding – no one will ever know what was taking place behind those amazing eyes. Only the camera knew.’The story of Garbo’s ...”

“... arms deals, the drug-smuggling operations, and the still unconfirmed CIA activities described by Robert Woodward in Veil. While fully agreeing with many of her views, I think Didion is slightly naive, as if the Cuban exiles of Miami were the only such group with émigré interests at work in the US Government and its entrepreneurial adjuncts. Think of the ...”

“... who ‘gave no more thought to the unbearable burdens of the Russian peasant’ than the Czar Alexander, is, like most statesmen, treated with contempt, unlike Chekhov, who remarked that if the upper classes could depute their bowel movements to the working classes they would do so, explaining that the best people should not waste on these merely ...”

“... Walker supplies a ‘chronological table’ that correlates authors and titles with events (Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone the same year that Henry James published Roderick Hudson; Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems coincided with Coca-Cola’s adoption of its ‘distinctly shaped bottle’). Still, naturalists have their ...”