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“... story. McQueen didn’t enjoy his success much. He was ill-humouredly envious of other actors – Paul Newman, an early rival, was christened ‘Fuckwit’ – and, in the 1960s at least, combative with almost everyone who worked on a film with him. When Richard Attenborough asked James Coburn why McQueen was so rude to him and all the other British ...”

“... Studies. These two books, by contrast, deal almost exclusively with Strachey’s politics. Michael Newman writes only briefly about Strachey’s private life, though he does reveal that young Charles Strachey, born at the height of his father’s revolutionary fervour, was promptly put down for Eton. Noel Thompson calls his book ‘an intellectual ...”

“... to tell people twice their age what to do. At the time when the undergraduate John Henry Newman was delighting in the inexhaustible metaphorical riches of Aeschylus at Oxford, the students of Maynooth were being fed a philistine diet of papist apologetics and garbled chunks of scholasticism. It was well nigh impossible, given this dismal context, for ...”

“... that was explicit by the time Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reached the screen with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. The play and movie were both big successes; Williams lived on them for decades. But the struggle over the third act had been painful, and his friendship with Kazan was never quite the same. He said once that the rewriting ‘seemed almost like a ...”

“... not only because she appears, with perhaps feigned humility, as a mere ‘creature’. As Barbara Newman shows in her brilliant new book, medieval Christians understood themselves to be interconnected to an extent that would surprise many people today, at least in Western cultures. Their minds and hearts were legible to other people as well as to God and the ...”

“... 1950s, he keeps faith with the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock rather than, say, Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko. Twombly’s brush and pencil are always moving, his fingers forever in the paint. Look closely and you’ll see just how densely textured his paintings are – the splashes, drips and streaks settle layer on layer – but from a distance ...”

“... attacks on Sanders from the Clintonite centre tend to either dismiss his ideas as ‘fantasies’ (Paul Krugman’s word) or evacuate the content of his politics and then tear him down in symbolic terms. Sanders’s callow millennial supporters are attracted to his purity and authenticity and are due for a wising up: his socialism would make him unelectable in ...”

“... time to pull down their cowshed and build a visitors’ centre. At the Vatican, however, Pope John Paul II disregarded a petition to complete Hildegard’s formal canonisation process (aborted in 1243) and declare her a doctor of the Church. Evidently, this most uppity of medieval women is not a model the Pope wants to raise up for emulation in the new ...”

“... by the touch of a female. After a brisk march through the history of sainthood – from Peter and Paul to the Reformation in just ninety pages – Bartlett turns to a leisured exploration of liturgical commemoration, relics and shrines, pilgrimage, church dedications, personal and place names, images of the saints and literary genres, including hagiography ...”

“... in an address to the Rambler about plainsong. Such support made the fastidious John Henry Newman shudder. ‘A profound silence’, he suggested, was the only way ‘to bear such blushing honours’. Nothing in Pugin’s life was more dramatic than his own transformation from talented but undirected dilettante to Roman Catholic architect, designer and ...”

“... practice. It is as if we had only the lyrics, without recordings or melodies, of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Joan Baez – and those only in indifferent Portuguese translations. Most of their power and all of their subtlety would vanish. For similar reasons, the troubadours have more often been honoured as cultural pioneers than admired as ...”

“... a lot of time for a film Hollywood considered an ‘epic flop’. Its only defender was the star, Paul Newman, who bravely called it ‘the most significant film I’ve ever made and the best’. He and Stone came out of it as friends, but reviews and box office were dismal. Stone was the screenwriter of record and in his memoir of the 1960s, Prime ...”

“... for literature squarely on the reader, not the writer. To the pure all things are pure, as St Paul says, while a corrupt mind sees nothing but corruption everywhere. Even bawdy tales have merit for those who know how to interpret them, but a reader who takes offence at trifles can just skip the offending stories and focus on the edifying ones. In ...”

“... more significant, part of that heritage is the habit typical of English Surrealists such as Paul Nash and Henry Moore of discovering and fondling and cherishing objets trouvés in the form of stones. Another part is the style of the spectacular photographs Long takes and publishes of his arrangements of those found objects within the landscapes where ...”

“... Neo-Impressionists aren’t obvious angels of chaos, yet Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac and Maximilien Luce all advocated anarchist positions, including ‘the propaganda of the deed’, aka bomb-throwing. This is one of the riddles of modernist art, and at its centre is the sphinx Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), great champion of Seurat ...”