“... a chatty survey of literary and artistic converts to Catholicism in England from John Henry Newman to the Second Vatican Council. Catholic journalists like McDonagh have always doted over these prize catches, but it is a good moment to investigate the way converts change the religion they embrace. Before Palm Sunday this year, the New York Times found ...”

“... By my count​ , of the 37 photographs of Michael Ovitz in this book there are 19 in which his mouth stays shut – while he’s smiling. That isn’t intended as a hostile remark. His mouth stayed closed when he smiled because he was concentrating. You may not have heard of him, but for maybe a decade and a half starting in the mid-1970s no one in the motion picture business was more focused than Michael Ovitz ...”

“... narrow, secret alleys, twittens everybody knows, the relief of that, the pub, the slope down into Newman Passage, the opening sequence of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a puddle of bloody neon, awkward stone setts, smokers in doorways; and then out, immediately, into another world, ...”

“... Gown (1987), which describes his introduction to counterintelligence in London during the war, and Michael Holzman’s James Jesus Angleton: The CIA and the Craft of Counterintelligence (2008). But Angleton laid out on the page is nothing like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for ...”

“... philosophers have names similar or identical to the names of actors in the drama: Putnam, Lewis, Newman, Clarke and Hartley. The whole spooky procedure recalls the celebrated episode when Coleridge and Wordsworth were eavesdropped-on in the West Country, and were heard to speak of the sinister ‘Spy Nozy’ (the philosopher Spinoza): there is the same mad ...”

“... or wordbutchers, and abuse of language, whether from ignorance or obfuscation, leads, as Newman persuasively argues, to a deterioration of moral values and standards of living. If this infelicitous piece of prose is all that his spleen about the decay of English brings him to then let us have Norman Mailer any day. The other line of defence for ...”

“... kitsch but he also does politics: The Rotters’ Club concerns itself with the Grunwick strike, Michael Edwardes and British Leyland, and the Birmingham pub bombing. Coe is only ever content with full context. His words can seem like a means to an end. They remind. They point things out. They are not themselves intended to impress. His prose is neat-o and ...”

“... else had got it wrong, which is not very endearing. Often he’s just rating his predecessors: ‘Newman is the best painter in the country’ (1964); ‘Pollock’s a greater artist than anyone working at the time or since’ (1967); ‘Pollock, Newman, Rothko and Still were the best painters’ (1993).Another style of ...”

“... that the puncture was an accident caused by a cat’s eye. (The disaster is at the centre of Michael Mann’s 2023 movie, Ferrari, starring Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz.) The Mille Miglia was cancelled indefinitely.After the death of Luigi Musso in the French Grand Prix in July 1958, the Catholic Church intervened to point the finger at Enzo Ferrari. An ...”

“... was quite extraordinarily complex, cross-grained and contradictory; his delight in what Ernest Newman called ‘public mysterification’ was as revealing as it was perverse; and his creative output has meant very different things to different people of different generations. The result is a personality easily evoked in part, but rarely encapsulated in ...”

“... For pity’s sake, are we talking about the university as conceived in the head of John Henry Newman, or about the sorry actualities in which Frank Kermode and I and until lately Helen Gardner have severally earned our keep? We may believe indeed that the Oxford English Faculty maintained, while Dame Helen was a member of it, a standard of considerate ...”

“... were counsellors, not an inner compulsion.Had Joan heard from the saints as she – or John Henry Newman – would have understood that term? Lang did not much care. The price he exacted for preserving the outré phenomena of religious history was their transference from theology to an expanded but recognisably scientific psychology. Sloan finds no glimmers ...”

“... of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin. As for London and Scottish Marine Oil’s Chris ...”

“... of Tracts for the Times in 1833, grew in fame along with its great polemicist John Henry Newman, was denounced for being a semi-covert form of Roman Catholicism, and then suffered a colossal scandal in 1845 when Newman became the highest profile convert to Catholicism in the history of England, thus confirming what ...”

“... in failure. For most of her adult life, she needed the financial support of her brother William Michael. The Brontë sisters also tried to set up a school – a regular ploy among educated women without money or husbands in the mid-Victorian period. They too failed. Then Emily and Anne died. Charlotte didn’t have a well-funded and well-disposed brother to ...”