“... most delightful melodies and attracting composers from Mozart and Beethoven to Saint-Saëns and Richard Strauss to write music for the instrument. I once heard Bruno Hoffmann, the most celebrated modern exponent, play his version of Franklin’s glass armonica. The sound was unforgettable – piercing, melancholy, otherworldly. And we have not mentioned the ...”

“... set in the Middle Ages; bicycled around France studying its medieval architecture; hero-worshipped Richard the Lionheart; rubbed medieval brasses; was fascinated by medieval heraldry, glass, coins and weapons; wrote his undergraduate thesis on crusader castles (his introduction to ‘Arabia’); and, before the war came along to interrupt his academic ...”

“... Marranos, Jews, or Infidels, the blasphemers of God’s holy name and of his son Jesus Christ’. Richard Verstegen, a Catholic polemicist, pointed to England’s courting of Muslim allies as proof of their godlessness, writing that ‘if we look what new confederates they have chosen, instead of the old, we shall see them to be the great Turk, the kings of ...”

“... good material for a more scholarly examination of such matters. So while the gardener and the cook in me found many points of interest, the historian found herself bristling with questions, almost all of which remained unanswered. How did the head gardener actually turn a ‘common field’ into a paradise? What tools and landscaping machinery were or ...”

“... effective he was. The jury was taken aback when Mr Heseltine’s Civil Service Private Secretary, Richard Mottram, casually revealed, to the incredulity of Ponting’s counsel and the jury, that the Commander-in Chief’s Official Report on the Falklands War had been tampered with behind his back, in relation to the crucial timing of the contact between HMS ...”

“... poets: Robert Herrick, who advised us to gather ye rosebuds while we may, and Richard Lovelace, the stone walls of whose incarceration by Parliament did not a prison make. But what is Stubbs’s account of Milton, the spokesman for regicide, doing in the book? Why do we tour the agonised mind of the Scottish Calvinist Sir Archibald ...”

“... they thought of the shooting. They all said they approved of it, and one man said he was off to cook a chicken in celebration. A month later the attacks have spread to the centre of Baghdad. I was waiting outside the National Museum, where the CPA had arranged a brief showing of the 3000-year-old golden treasure of Nimrud, whisked for the occasion from the ...”

“... be a godfather to Private Eye, as satire and exultant disrespect returned to Britain in the 1960s. Richard Ingrams and Peter Cook – three decades younger – let him guest-edit a gorgeous special number on the Profumo scandal in 1963, in which, among other scoops, he drove Whitehall to apoplectic fury by printing the name ...”

“... With his attendant expert, Dr Daniel Solander, a gifted pupil of Linnaeus, Banks joined Cook’s Transit of Venus expedition to Tahiti aboard the Endeavour in 1768-71, outspending the Admiralty by a factor of two and a half in outfitting his personal entourage of draftsmen, assistants and servants. On his return to England, Banks reigned as one of ...”

“... their most sparky when working for the DNB: Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Shiva Naipaul, for instance, or Richard Ingrams on Claud Cockburn (although Ingrams has taken the trouble, it seems, to check through the Times’s files in search of that famous Cockburn headline: ‘Small Earthquake in Chile. Not Many Dead’. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t there.) Strange that ...”

“... phenomenon. Although Chamberlain’s return from Munich was televised live (with commentary by Richard Dimbleby), the general consensus in the early days was that television and politics didn’t mix. Thus Sir William Haley, Director-General of the BBC in the late Forties, believed that television was totally unsuited to political discussion. The ...”

“... first saw the photograph in Theodora Fitzgibbon’s A Taste of Scotland – evidently a regional cook-book with touristic overtones. But the whimsy about not believing in the mainland is an invented one, virtually signposted as such, and sounds as though it emanates from the poet rather than the photographer – a poet coyly aware of playing with tourist ...”

“... needs, took to offering small money prizes for problems that caught his fancy, never learned to cook, drive a car, wash his clothes or become anything other than an appalling house guest, who thought little of waking his hosts in the middle of the night to shut his windows. He seems to have loved children, sought out mathematical prodigies to ...”

“... had on British zoology following the return of the Endeavour, the ship that carried James Cook and Joseph Banks to Australia. These animals became, in the course of the 19th century, the focus of disputes about mammalian classification. Darwin thought they might well be viewed as links between mammals, birds and reptiles. His bête noire, ...”

“... most Parisians, but Ayer lived in Guy de Rothschild’s house in Paris, supported by a butler, a cook and a good cellar. When this arduous postwar service was over he returned to Oxford, at a time when philosophy in Oxford had yet to become Oxford philosophy and, in his view (Ryle, perhaps, apart, and H.H. Price), needed a good shaking. Real philosophy was ...”