“... of mines. Humboldt also lived another life, publishing his first book in 1790, on the basalt rock of the Rhine valley; other scientific works followed it. He was taken up by Goethe and Schiller, and travelled Europe in pursuit of his geological and botanical interests. When his mother died in 1796, Humboldt came into money and resigned his position. He ...”

“... Workington, Barrow, Bradford and Manchester, who pioneered the routes up vertical or overhanging rock that have enthralled many of us. Any survey of a complex history will always be found to default on this or that detail. Maybe Thompson did not set out to write a comprehensive study in the manner of W.G. Collingwood’s The Lake Counties, first published in ...”

“... million came in only last Friday!’ Easy come, easy go. When the boss of the central bank, David Oddsson, and the finance minister, Arni Mathiesen, declared after nationalising Icesave that Iceland would not pay these debts – or, in Mathiesen’s version, might perhaps settle some part of them – the UK applied its anti-terrorist laws to freeze the ...”

“... so he could talk to the president alone. He told them he had a personal message to convey from David Cameron. In fact, he used the time to pursue some business on behalf of Tony Blair Associates, his commercial calling card. He wanted to sell the Nigerians Israeli drones and other military equipment for use in their fight against Islamic rebels. If true ...”

“... landscapes – a distant tractor ploughing towards the sea, unpeopled expanses of cloud and rock – seem calmly out of time.At the Photographers’ Gallery (where Chris Killip: Retrospective runs until 19 February), the Isle of Man landscapes feel like breathing space between the extraordinary portraits. Killip came, as he put it, from ‘a buoyant ...”

“... Academy and showed his work at the Kunstakademie in Dresden (where he became friends with Caspar David Friedrich), though his paintings are strangely devoid of the scientific observation that underpinned his anatomical studies.On completing two doctorates, in philosophy and medicine, and in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, he took a position as an ...”

“... multifarious trophies from prehistory. Excavated burials stand upended as panels. Great slabs of rock art and of timber – for instance, the circle of tree trunks uncovered on a Norfolk beach in 1998, the so-called Seahenge – rise up along the way. There are eloquent peat-preserved minutiae: an elm leaf from a Lancashire site intact after six millennia, a ...”

“... of the year; U is the 21st letter of the alphabet). Brown and his colleagues, Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz, have submitted a name to the International Astronomical Union, but it will remain secret until it gets the IAU’s stamp of approval. Unofficially, they’re calling it ‘Xena’, after the character played by Lucy Lawless in the camp fantasy ...”

“... foreseeable future, Eliot’s reputation will remain, like the Church in ‘Choruses from “The Rock”’, ‘always decaying, and always being restored’: a magnet for the self-righteously censorious, but also for those who continue to look for poetry, ‘and not some other thing’ instead, to answer their own needs. Were his reputation to sink ...”

“... Hope (2000) preceded her next big one, Behindlings (2002); Clear (2004), a furious defence of David Blaine’s 44-day exhibition of hunger artistry at Tower Bridge, interrupted the composition of Darkmans (2007); and Burley Cross Postbox Theft was conceived and delivered during the writing of The Yips, out soon, which seems likely to continue the ...”

“... Biden has had a career that reads like the Stations of the Cross for an American baby boomer: rock ’n’ roll, real estate, financial services and insurance for unions, a hedge fund, global ‘deal making’, and at last the healthcare sector. In the 1970s he and a partner opened a rock club in Wilmington called the ...”

“... how chief Pistol Johnny Rotten and svengali manager Malcolm McLaren plotted the downfall of the rock establishment and how by hard work, good timing and brilliant PR, the Pistols shocked the nation.’ Pete got some other things from Glen’s mouth, including a fierce description of working-class community, which he believes to be now destroyed, in his ...”

“... to Imperial Berlin; his paintings here of a Medieval City on a River and of a Gothic Church on a Rock by the Sea, made right at the beginning of the story of German unification in 1815, contributed to the formation of national consciousness. In them a German style (Gothic), storm clouds and the rising sun, stand for national renewal. Caspar ...”

“... Brooke and was the model for George Emerson in Forster’s A Room with a View. And he was a great rock climber, perhaps the best. He missed the first year of the war because he was a schoolmaster at Charterhouse, and was allowed to enlist only in late 1915. He didn’t serve on the front for 16 of the last 18 months of the fighting, though he did go through ...”

“... decade – ever since I passed a long queue of anxious depositors outside a branch of Northern Rock in September 2007 – the idea that we might be living through our own version of the 1930s has proved irresistible. The run on Northern Rock augured a financial collapse on the scale of 1929, and has been followed by the ...”