I just read those pages over and over again. And then another few times for luck. When I dug around to try find more about it all I could find were really confusing papers written on the subject. There was also the wikipedia entry which also required a few reads.
I've decided that in the end, the chances are that they will ask us for formal proofs in the final so I'm going to concentrate on being able to do those.
alrightly then... with some help from Rajeev Gore (http://videolectures.net/ssll09_gore_iml/) and re-reading this again and again the light has finally come on. faak yeah!!