“... on his thumb. The second-century arch at Ctesiphon is in the same high style: the greenjackets took us there. It is ‘the widest single-span vault of unreinforced brickwork in the world, 75 feet wide and 110 feet high’ (according to Gavin Young’s book, Iraq: Land of Two Rivers). Beneath this arch, the Roman Emperor Caracalla, himself part-Syrian, once ...”

“... Orwell took little care of his manuscripts. He didn’t anticipate that collectors of such things would pay real money for them, and that universities would think it a privilege to turn a writer’s bits and pieces into an archive. The typescript used in the printing of Nineteen Eighty-Four is in the Orwell Archive at University College London ...”

“... advocated, and blamed their failures on the dead weight of resistance at all levels of society. John Cook, Charles I’s prosecutor, said that ‘we would have enfranchised the people, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom.’ William Sedgwick told the generals that ‘not one of a hundred will own what you set down as the public ...”

“... that bizarre institution, Trinity College, from 1592 to 1952, the year in which Provost McConnell took up office and directed the College toward its present form. McDowell is a Senior Fellow of Trinity and a well-known historian. David Webb is a Fellow Emeritus of the College and Honorary Professor of Systematic Botany. ‘Virtue and religion’ meant, of ...”

“... Mike Gatting, England’s captain, explained that the real problem was Botham’s bowling. Botham took a wicket with his first ball, another the next over, another soon after that. Then he scored an astonishing 59 not out in 32 balls. Before long, he was having a row with Somerset County Cricket Club Committee, which sacked his two friends Richards and ...”

“... hagiographies, and the starting point for all modern treatments, was written by the antiquarian John Aubrey towards the end of Hobbes’s long and eventful life (1588-1679). This became the fullest of the pen-portraits which make up Brief Lives, and from Aubrey we learn that Hobbes was, in many respects, a quintessential product of the age. He grew up in ...”

“... piss-taking and don’t carry the weight that ‘any novel does’. After his death, in 1995, Amis took less of a battering than Larkin had. Martin Amis’s Experience (2000) softened the prevailing image of him as the meanest drunk at the Garrick, and Zachary Leader’s biography wasn’t unkind. Amis’s ogreish ways weren’t news anyway: annoying feminists ...”

“... to affirmative action that Papa Rice was assistant dean at Denver University, where Condoleezza took her first and third degrees. And although she claims that her father had no interest in direct political action against the bombers and racists of Birmingham, Alabama, John Rice made a passionate speech to the campus in ...”

“... Bail’s stories were included in an influential anthology, The Most Beautiful Lies (1977), which took its title from Mark Twain’s observation that Australian history contained weird, wonderful, terrible departures from civilised norms. As Bail later wrote in his Introduction to The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories (1987), local ...”

“... the first common burglar in the history of petty crime who ‘panicked’ in such a way that he took his victim out of the house, where he and she were relatively unobserved, and in broad daylight drove her through crowded streets to a place where he carried out a ritual murder. There were those at the time who challenged the police assumptions. There were ...”

“... a fervent faith in hierarchies, especially when he is at the top of them. From the moment he took power at the Sunday Times, he set about ridding the paper of what he called the ‘space barons’. The Insight team was disbanded, he writes, because it was engaged in ‘a series of second-rate investigations that were going nowhere’. He would keep the ...”

“... for fresh marches of conquest. The ensuing adventures were narrated with devastating flatness by John Hemming in The Search for El Dorado. The gold-hunters got lost, ate grubs, grass and one another, were plagued by bugs and vampires, swelled or shrivelled or turned orange, devoured sweaty saddles in fits of salt-thirst, perished of ...”

“... mechanical production of mass entertainment (the downside of Hollywood) and the academicism they took to be the besetting sin of French cinema. This position came to be articulated through the two concepts for which early Cahiers was best known: auteur and mise en scène. Despite the accompanying promotional noise, auteur-theory amounted to little more than ...”

“... Man?) good looks made him, too, a valuable commodity at the Caroline Court. This was John Churchill, toy boy of the Duchess of Cleveland, one of Charles II’s discarded mistresses. Churchill, too, was treading a familiar trail: his elder sister was the Duke of York’s concubine. They married secretly, against the wishes of both families, and ...”

“... the bunch of young men, mostly from New College, Oxford, whom Lord Milner summoned or took with him to rebuild South Africa after the Boer War. With their mission completed by the foundation of the Union of South Africa, they returned to England but maintained some cohesion by starting a quarterly review, The Round Table, dedicated to turning the ...”