Down Street Underground station — Winston Churchill's wartime bunker

Down Street Tube station in Mayfair, about halfway between Hyde Park Corner and Green Park in London, was used as a subterranean meeting place for Winston Churchill and his war cabinet. The PM had his own private bathroom in a dank passageway, and he even slept there before declaring, in 1940, that he was uncomfortable with "hiding" from German bombs by becoming a "mole". Down Street station opened on March 15, 1907, but most locals were too rich to bother using public transport and it closed in 1932. It remained derelict until the second world war, when a bolt hole, safe from aerial bombardment, was needed for Churchill and the war cabinet to convene in.

The ceilings were bolstered with concrete and steel, and walls were built on the platforms to hide them from passing Piccadilly-line trains (which could stop on official request). The complex included a typing pool, a telephone exchange and an elevator so tiny that Churchill once famously
got stuck in it. The PM even used Down Street to entertain: Sir John Colville, his principal private secretary, later recalled he "dined excellently" there, enjoying brandy, cigars and caviar (virtually unobtainable at the time). Today the station lies empty, though it is occasionally used as a film location; the British horror film Creep, out now, in which the actress Franka Potente (left) is pursued through London's Underground system by a homicidal fiend, was partly shot in the station.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

"It is a tricky problem to find the particular calibration in time that would be appropriate to stem the acceleration in risk premiums created by falling incomes without prematurely aborting the decline in the inflation-generated risk premiums."

Translation: "I haven't a clue why inflation's rising."

Alan Greenspan, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, tries to explain in 1974 why Nixon's policies are backfiring.

LISTOMANIA

Five body parts named after Italians

Organ of Corti: the organ of hearing in the middle ear. Alfonso Corti (1822-88) studied medicine and anatomy in Vienna and wrote a thesis on the reptilian cardiovascular system. He retired to his estates soon after publishing his work on the ear.

Eustachian tube: tube from the middle ear to the throat that equalises pressure in the ear. Considered a father of anatomy, Bartolommeo Eustachio (c1520-74) worked in Rome as a physician to leading clerics.

Fallopian tubes: pair of tubes that conduct eggs from the ovaries to the uterus. Gabriel Fallopius (1523-62), a professor of anatomy at Pisa and Padua, coined the word "vagina" and invented a condom.

Ruffini's corpuscles: sensory nerve endings that respond to warmth. Angelo Ruffini (1864-1929) stained slides with gold chloride to reveal the tiny cells. Starting as a country doctor, he went on to become a professor.

Sertoli cells: cells of the testis that nourish sperm cells. Enrico Sertoli (1842-1910) discovered them in 1865, while he was still a postgraduate student in physiology in Vienna. He later became a professor of anatomy and physiology in Milan.

From The Book of Lists, by David Wallechinsky and Amy Wallace (Canongate, £12.99)