“... the maiden speech for which he was instantly awarded the Garter. When I joined, I discovered that Richard Adrian is quite right: it is like a prep school. There are any number of corridors down which to get lost. Nobody tells you how to find the Gents, and you’re too shy to ask. The rituals are as arcane to the newcomer as they are familiar to the old ...”

“... and clemency (increasingly absent in his later years) in opposing and preventing a cruel White Terror were remarkable. His interest in science, however much that of an occasional dilettante and patron, was genuine and forward-looking, as was his promotion of shipbuilding and of the Navy. He fostered the arts. His bravery and humanity during the Great ...”

“... a report that prostitutes were carrying on in the black-out by shining a torch in the pocket of a white raincoat. The woman author of a war diary, who had felt guilty because her town had escaped bombing, was at last able to report a near-hit: ‘Never in my life have I experienced such pure and flawless happiness.’ Alert observation, hard facts, subjective ...”

“... as he was to the antiquities, though not in a way that pleased everyone: as his fellow traveller Richard Chandler wrote in the journals he published a decade after their return to England, ‘several of the Turks murmured, and some threatened, because he overlooked their houses; obliging them to confine or remove the women, to prevent their being seen from ...”

“... VIP paedophile rings. It went big on ‘Pizzagate’, the bogus 2016 conspiracy theory spread by white supremacists proposing that the Democratic Party was concealing child abuse by senior officials. That’s not to suggest paedophile rings don’t exist, but you need to be careful about the way such allegations can be made to appear instantly substantial by ...”

“... symbolism), a burnt-out novelist who is trenchantly characterised – the aureole of prematurely white hair, the professional smiles, the psychotherapist’s way of knowing everything about you and always being right, of understanding your tantrums almost before they happen. Into this hotbed comes Mary Lamb, whose memory sucks and whoops and sinks – the ...”

“... was – and what sort of artist produced it – was considerably less clear-cut (less black and white) than the graphics it used. Perhaps the most instructive attempt to set out shared principles was drawn up in 1969 by the American artist Sol LeWitt. As befits the idiom current at that moment, the artist’s chosen format was a list of 35 ‘Sentences on ...”

“... tea, with sugar and some wild mint leaves’ which she ‘puts into a bowl lined with slices of white bread’ to make a birthday treat ‘for Emanuel, of whom she is especially fond. There are no candles, but later there will be stars.’ The cute multiculturalism is complete when Tomasz gets out his guitar. ‘And so united in song we enjoyed the Radiance ...”

“... Boers, who feared that they might be used to prove the antiquity of the world. The naturalist Richard Owen, who worked in London at the centre of an imperial network, identified them as the remains of mammal-like reptiles that he called dicynodonts (from the two canine teeth that these animals used to break up their diet of plants). Pinpointing the ...”

“... now firmly established, whether it’s a pride of lions bringing down a zebra on the Serengeti or white-tailed eagles going after barnacle geese in the Hebrides (as happens later in the first episode of Wild Isles): the singling out of the prey (‘one exhausted goose is left behind’), the sudden pursuit, the desperate flight, the near escape, the ...”

“... of Mohamed Fayed to the Sultan of Brunei in 1984. The Swami, a giant bearded figure in flowing white, claims to advise a number of political figures around the world, including King Hussein of Jordan, President Mobutu, Rajiv Gandhi and Richard Nixon. He is currently on his way to visit ex-President Marcos in Honolulu. He ...”

“... educated outside the normal rut at Dartington, and then, after a spell at Gray’s Inn, by Richard Titmuss at the LSE, free therefore of the resentment, deference, fantasy and fear which drive a large part of the rest of the profession, he has an innocent energy in the face of what he once called ‘the chipped ...”

“... She has been celebrated as a stylish genre defier, in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith and Richard Price – and her books sell. French’s opening salvo was leaving one of the chief mysteries in her first novel, In the Woods, unsolved. Since then, she has demonstrated remarkable range. The classic detective series follows a single familiar ...”

“... reinterpretation whenever the hive challenged conventional wisdom. An early 17th-century expert, Richard Remnant, contended that beekeepers could use their knowledge of queen bees to control women. Butler was forced to accept the existence of the queen but frothed: ‘Let no nimble-tongued sophisters gather a false conclusion from these true premises.’ In ...”

“... see the creased, gentle and infinitely sad face of Albert Einstein – back-lit, his dishevelled white hair glowing like a saintly halo. Or the gaunt stick-figure of Robert Oppenheimer in his last years, hair close-cropped – a starving Buddha, worn down by political persecution and the atomic scientist’s ‘knowledge of sin’. Even now, the cover of A ...”