“... is more piously revered than Joseph Beuys, who, for his first commercial gallery exhibition, as Andrew Brighton recalls, ‘smeared his head with honey and gold, tied to his right shoe an iron sole as a companion to the felt sole of his left and took into his arms a dead hare to which he appeared to speak for three hours’. In this way, he ‘mixed ...”

“... coolly, with little of the venom or relish of such fellow plutocrats as Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller. Most criticism he ignored, cultivating a forbidding taciturnity. ‘He left no record of his response’ is a familiar motif in the biography. What Morgan left instead – and what the biography exhaustively records and ...”

“... diet’. The instinct Freud recognised as Thanatos was dramatised by Shaw as ‘the gospel of St Andrew Undershaft’. (Incidentally, Freud and Shaw shared a fondness for the Salvation Army.) Cusins is allured into accepting the Undershaft inheritance by the Dionysian intoxication of pure destruction (which is why Cusins’s Greek scholarship specialises in ...”

“... George Cony​ , a London merchant, had once been a friend of Oliver Cromwell. But when the Lord Protector slapped a tax on silk imports without the consent of Parliament, Mr Cony protested that this was the sort of arbitrary behaviour for which Cromwell had lambasted the late king, and demanded that the unjust tax be repaid to him ...”

“... head west for about 40 kilometres into the Gaeltacht: we’re to have lunch with an old friend, Andrew, in the Beehive Bar near the coast. He’s there in the car-park having a smoke. I manage to refuse his offer of a Sweet Afton, and as I do so he notices my copy of Dean Godson’s biography of David Trimble, Himself Alone, lying in the back seat with ...”

“... diary entry dealing with Woolf’s attendance at the crucial Labour Party Conference of 1935 where George Lansbury resigned as leader after a dramatic attack on his pacifism by Ernest Bevin – this was a turning point in the evolution of Three Guineas, the moment when the connection between feminism and Anti-Fascism seemed to fall into place. She passes over ...”

“... notwithstanding the prince’s manifest lack of enthusiasm for ‘excruciating details’ about George VI’s diet. Shaw once said that Coriolanus was ‘Shakespeare’s greatest comedy’, on the grounds that we don’t sympathise with any of the characters, and there are moments on reading about the Blacks when one feels the same. The physically ...”

“... even if they did not encourage him in his deviant designs. Among his colleagues at the BBC were George Orwell and Louis MacNeice, both of whom he greatly admired; and there were others, their names by now probably forgotten, who brought conviction and real knowledge to Empson’s side of the fight. One such, Ralf Bonwit, a formidable, dedicated Japanese ...”

“... and eventual thwarting – of apolitical humanitarianism was most starkly evident under George W. Bush. Campaigning in New Hampshire in 2000, Bush promised he would never use the denial of food as an instrument of foreign policy. He picked Andrew Natsios as his administrator of USAID: a figure with extensive ...”

“... and set the agenda for coalition with the Lib Dems. It became widely unpopular in 2012, when George Osborne made clear that high-income earners would endure less austerity than everyone else. The polarising effects of the cuts and the rise in university tuition fees then conveniently destroyed the Lib Dem brand and any threat it might have posed to the ...”

“... in our lifetime has showed physical strength. This is like going back to Teddy Roosevelt or George Washington,’ the clerk said. (After being shot while campaigning in Milwaukee, Roosevelt kept speaking for fifty minutes while blood soaked his shirt.) Musk had just sent out an email asking federal workers to detail what they had accomplished at work ...”

“... had understood of Taylor’s screen appeal was A Place in the Sun, a 1951 noirish film directed by George Stevens and co-starring Montgomery Clift. It tells the story of George Eastman (Clift), the poor relation of a wealthy family who is torn between two women: Shelley Winters as Alice, who works in the same factory and to ...”

“... and writers of opposing tastes in delighted admiration, provided they didn’t look too closely.As Andrew Saint​ has observed, among the first colonisers of the no longer distant Surrey hills were the painters Myles Birket Foster and James Hook. They were in the van of an easeled army. Charles O’Brien, the latest editor of the Surrey volume of The ...”

“... be more of this. 23 May. Ros Chatto, my agent, calls to say I have been offered a role in the BBC Andrew Davies adaptation of Fanny Hill. She reads through this raunchy script finding no mention of the part for which I’m slated until she gets to the very final scene, where Fanny meets an old and respectable gentleman (me) whom she fucks to extinction, then ...”

“... the era of the art-house, the film-society circuit, film magazines and film schools began. Andrew Sarris launched the cult of the auteur. His key thesis was Citizen Kane: The American Baroque, in which he described Kane as ‘the work that influenced the cinema more profoundly than any American film since Birth of a Nation’. If you regarded film as ...”