Alex Moulton’s daily life may lack the love and care of immediate family, but otherwise it is as packed with interest and activity as any 88-year-old’s in Britain. Moulton, a tall, trim man with the ice-green eyes of a hawk and the nose of a Roman emperor, rises each morning in the third-floor bedroom of his 20-room mansion – a 17th-century house in Bradford-on-Avon that looks like a mini-Longleat and has been described by Country Life as one of the most exquisite in Britain. He enters his adjoining workroom, where he pores over papers, manuals and books piled on long tables. For the next few hours, or “as long as I feel inspired and interested”, he works on the designs for his latest engineering creation, a machine “more radical than anything I have ever done”.