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“... keeping one when he married her. By the time he was famous, the disciples who surrounded him all took down everything he did and said. Dr Makovitsky, a particularly assiduous member of the circle, even taught himself to write blind with a tiny pencil on a tiny pad inside his pocket: it enabled him to take notes during meals without anyone (except the ...”

“... the continuing conflict becomes far less easy to explain than the much desired peace that took decades to arrive.The politics of Irish Republicanism were neither categorical nor static. In December 1969 the IRA split into two factions. The Official IRA led by Cathal Goulding – known as the ‘Stickies’ – turned to Marxism, soon concluding that ...”

“... luvvies; it began with quite serious purposes and ambitions. With his rancorous first biographer, John Hawkins (Johnson coined the term ‘unclubbable’ for Hawkins, who after a few years, was ostracised from the Turk’s Head), Johnson had already founded the Ivy Lane Club, which ran for several years but broke up around 1756. The new club was a rather ...”

“... with stately ‘uniformitarianism’. All change, geological or biological, took place gradually, steadily. Any talk of catastrophe, Lyell admonished, was ‘unphilosophical’. The evidence of catastrophe accrued nonetheless. Geologists have understood since the 17th century that sedimentary layers of rock and soil mark the passage of ...”

“... Nero is the Colosseum, even if that was not the intention. In fact, the new Flavian dynasty which took control of Rome in AD 69 erected this vast pleasure palace for the people precisely in order to obliterate Nero’s memory. It was a calculated decision to build a public amphitheatre on the site of the artificial lake that had been one of the most infamous ...”

“... summoned. His lofty earlier debates on the Agony in the Garden and Cain and Abel with his friend John Colet would have remained unknown – Colet was not one to rush into print – if Erasmus had not written them up and got them into circulation. If Colet’s new St Paul’s School was known abroad, it was Erasmus’s doing. Even Jean Vitrier, coming to ...”

“... to his early death at the age of 61 in 2001. The journalism with which he made his name took essentially the same approach. Standing head on to a subject and giving it ‘a good wiggle’, regardless of the consequences, became his stock in trade. Many journalists are fearless in the pursuit of truth, but Waugh was not, for the most part, a ...”

“... in that: he would be president himself one day. So it came to pass. As president, Johnson took advantage of all the powers of office he had done his best to preserve intact. These powers, along with his secretive and manipulative personality, allowed him to drag the country step by step into the Vietnam War. The oversight that might have saved him ...”

“... decline, but eating bananas had been the major cause of death. A lawyer called Albert T. Patrick took charge of the funeral arrangements. On the day after Rice’s death, Patrick tried to have four cheques certified. The cheques, all made out to himself, totalled $250,000, and appeared to have been signed by Rice on the day before he died. When James ...”

“... Holy Land was at its most holy in your own heart. This might be a demanding belief for those who took it seriously, but religious certainty could also make it a comfort. Sometimes the reassurance came a little too easily. Even when such faith was common, the inward annexation of the Holy Land made sophisticated religious thinkers suspicious. In Apocalypse ...”

“... and on 2 May the blockade began in earnest. Hemon, in Chicago, applied for political asylum and took any job he could find – assembling sandwiches, selling magazine subscriptions door to door – while getting to work on his English; later he enrolled on a master’s course at Northwestern University. By the time he was able to revisit Sarajevo, in ...”

“... the far end of a corridor of brilliant commentary. There are many entries here for the writers who took up with him – Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Sartre and Beauvoir, Jean Genet and others – though none under B for Beckett, and none for John Berger, who was cool at first, then much warmer, coming under fire from ...”

“... found a patron in Fred Holland Day, a wealthy Bostonian aesthete and photographer, who not only took photographs of Gibran (a big-eyed, soulful-looking boy), but also introduced him to the writings of Maeterlinck and Whitman.Eventually, Day became an eccentric recluse, but by then Gibran had found other patrons. He was to spend a large part of his life ...”

“... all of which passed by in the opposite direction. Then one ship came in our direction, halted and took us on board. That ship was the Saddam Hussein. Was the first thing we should have done to question the captain about his human rights credentials?’ Were you a Palestinian, would you thank Mr Bush? If you were an Indian or Pakistani contract worker, or a ...”

“... pleased. The situation was accepted by circle on circle of distinguished friends, and when Arthur took a second mistress, a warm-hearted and perhaps rather tactless young journalist from New Zealand, it seemed best, as far as possible, to ignore her. Alison Grant Robertson had none of the qualifications (knowing the Stracheys, knowing the Farjeons, knowing ...”