“... said the waiter. ‘It’s a mistake.’ I reached the 1990s without mishap, though Miss Shepherd, the lady who lived for 15 years in a van in my drive, died at the end of April 1989, after which the undertaker rang up wondering if 9 May would be a suitable day for her funeral. ‘Why not?’ I said. I was only surprised that I hadn’t thought of it ...”

“... often depicted on pots. But until the 1952 decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, the ruling orthodoxy was that a hypothesised ‘Minoan’ was the (un-Greek) language of the palace culture of Crete and the Mycenaean settlements, so that the origins of the Iliad must come after that, not earlier than the start of the first ...”

“... had another connection to Jane Elgee before her marriage. In a letter to his son William in 1921, John Butler Yeats wrote of Jane Wilde: ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when the circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it.’ Butt enjoyed various romances, and was, on occasion, heckled at public meetings by the ...”

“... 2005 papal conclave, when he was the main contender against Joseph Ratzinger after the death of John Paul II. It centred on the arrest and torture of two Jesuit priests, Oswaldo Yorio and Franz Jalics. Bergoglio had known both of them since the early 1960s – they had been his teachers. By the time Bergoglio took over as provincial of Argentina and ...”

“... married and who’s just had their second child, that he’s having an on-set affair with Cybill Shepherd: ‘Peter apologised, claimed he couldn’t help it, that he had never had a cover girl before, that he was in the throes of a sexual obsession.’ A couple of pages later we learn that the screenwriter and lyricist Jacob Brackman liked nitrous oxide so ...”

“... didn’t at first take over the government but used the army’s capacity for persuasion to shepherd civilian politicians before assuming overall political control – though still operating behind civilian front-men – in November 1951. To consolidate his authority he did what Nasser was soon to do in Egypt: he banned all political parties and set up ...”

“... of the democratic will, its local functionaries dismissing it as ‘meaningless’. But in the shepherd of the referendum, Michael Mouskos, it had met with more than it reckoned. Five months later, he was elected head of the church, at the age of 37, as Archbishop Makarios III. Son of a goatherd, he had gone from a seminary in Cyprus to university in ...”