“... The Wiki authors seem here to be thinking of, among others, Henry Darger, the obsessive, reclusive, quasi-paedophilic Chicago hospital janitor and bona fide outsider-genius, who died in 1973, leaving behind hundreds of extraordinary scrolls of artwork, exquisitely painted and collaged, depicting an apocalyptic ...”

“... lore had Warhol moving into bed with his mother while his father slept upstairs with Paul and John [Warhol’s siblings],’ Gopnik writes. When Julia moved to New York to live with her son, people ‘thought she was stupid’, a friend said, ‘but she was brilliant beyond belief … and much smarter than Andy.’In high school, Warhol was not known for ...”

“... as strong for disliking the editors of the Times Literary Supplement (successively Alan Pryce-Jones, Arthur Crook and John Gross) and indeed held the whole London literary world in contempt as a self-serving clique. He became a lecturer in 1936, already over forty, and a full lecturer at 52. MacKillop deals with this ...”

“... country … The silence, I find, is a factor which has enabled the evil to spread.’ Likewise John Gordon, in the Sunday Express, who seized on John Gielgud’s arrest for importuning in 1953 as a chance to rip aside the ‘protective veil’ of delicacy around this ‘repulsive’ and ‘peculiarly ...”

“... star, but which applied to literature too, the success of J.B. Priestley and, at a later date, John Braine evinced by their brisk departure from their Bradford birthplace. In this respect the Brontë Sisters (Mam had seen the films, though she’d not read the books) were thought to be tragic figures, not on account of their bleak upbringing or their short ...”

“... leaders of the country’s emerging counter-culture, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, LeRoi Jones and Robert Creeley. It also ran a selection of the early work of a maverick graduate student in English at the University of Tulsa, Ted Berrigan. Berrigan was soon accompanying Brainard and his fellow editors, the poets Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup, on their ...”

“... portrayals of a menacing society that turns those icons of American innocence, Spencer Tracy and Henry Fonda, into hunted, vengeance-seeking, prison escapees. Tracy, nearly lynched, flees a burning jail. Fonda plays a three-time loser framed for a killing that will send him to the chair. As he is trying to cross the border carrying his dead wife in his ...”

“... of popular music, spinning the Beatles in a new direction. Meeting Shankar changed things for John Coltrane, too, helping him shake his dependence on drugs, while opening his ears to Eastern scales. Before Philip Glass worked with Shankar on a film score in 1965, he had been churning out unremarkable pastiches of French neoclassicism fused with folksy ...”

“... military establishment and the new government in Washington, a town presided over by another John/Jack the lad. Profumo’s go-getting reputation and unstuffy demeanour made him attractive to the men around JFK, who liked that he didn’t seem like a typical Brit, never mind a typical Tory. He was extremely sociable, and well suited to the work ...”

“... signed by its sender and encrypted to its receiver’. The public key, or address, is matched, as John Lanchester handily described it in the LRB, to ‘a private key which provides access to that address’. A key is really just a string of numbers and digits: the public key demonstrates ownership of any given address; the private key can only be used by the ...”

“... approach, which he identifies specifically with the work of the doyen of current practitioners, Henry Pelling. ‘Inconsistent even in the explanations that it does adduce to explain the rise of labour, traditional labour history is a lode of interesting and important facts crushed together to hagiographically confirm Labour’s mythologies.’ This seems ...”

“... Beardsley spent far too much of his life in doctors’ waiting-rooms (in one of which he met Henry Harland, his co-editor at the Yellow Book), swallowing creosote pills, spitting up blood, undergoing capricious treatments, collapsing exhausted into bed, seeking relief in sea air and living in terror of dying abandoned abroad. Early in 1898, he died in ...”

“... pattern with Johns. About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so ...”

“... to the burning sun, which sends him blind. One other scene stands out. The hero, Harry Faversham (John Clements), fears he is a coward and having declined to go with his regiment to the Sudan goes native in order to prove himself by working unrecognised to assist his ex-colleagues who have sent him the feathers. To corroborate his disguise as a harmless ...”

“... Palmer, were George Richmond and Edward Calvert. Shoreham for the Ancients functioned as, in Henry James’s phrase, ‘the Great Good Place’ – ‘a valley so hidden,’ Calvert said, ‘that it looked as if the devil had not yet found it out.’ The Shoreham spirit that emerges from the letters and reminiscences seems as much larky as it was rapt, a ...”