“... son, Nelson Bunker Hunt, made an oil fortune of his own drilling in Libya, but then Gaddafi took power and nationalised the wells. In the 1970s he funded the political evangelicals of the Bible Belt, a movement whose votes every Republican president since Reagan has depended on. John McCain is the party’s first ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... classed his enormous erudite books among the many that he refused on principle to read. John Evelyn, visiting Rome in 1644, was impressed when ‘with Dutch patience, he showed us his perpetual motions, catoptrics, magnetical experiments, models, and a thousand other crotchets and devices.’ He predicted that in a forthcoming book on obelisks ...”

“... alone most of his academic and BBC lectures from more than fifty years of teaching. To say Briggs took on too much is a laughable understatement. By the end of his life, his unfinished commitments towered over him. And yet it’s not quite right to conclude that he could never say no. His problem was wonderfully positive: he always said yes, with bursting ...”

“... crucial date in the story of how colour entered the world of art photography is 1976, the year John Szarkowski, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, organised an exhibition of William Eggleston’s colour prints. Many people were shocked: first because the leading museum of modern art was willing to exhibit colour ...”

“... a family friend whom he didn’t like, out of obscurity into being the Blooms’ cleaner; he took down a pompous ex-friend from his plinth as assistant director of the National Library to being a nosey menace who passes in a second. To some artists, the world is quite absent until imagined, and Joyce thought it silly that a writer wouldn’t use what was ...”

“... an expression of what Woolf described in her diary as ‘the frock consciousness’ of life. She took considerable care about her own appearance but like most of the writers Terry Newman discusses in Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore (HarperCollins, £20), she was not interested in fashion per se. Her friend Madge Garland, who edited Vogue and ...”

“... that fills the whole universe and the human soul’. By the 1950s, he had come to the attention of John Bennett, a British fossil fuel researcher and follower of the mystic George Gurdjieff. Bennett invited Subuh to Britain in 1957, and he returned to Jakarta with a coterie of new European and Australian disciples. In 1966 the movement set up a very ...”

“... 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 ...”