“... could build to more sustained recognitions; as in the intense rendering of the plain faces of a man and a woman: The young man’s eyes had the opal lightings of dark oil and, though he was watching me in a way that relaxed me to cold weakness and ignobility, they fed too strongly inward to draw to a focus: whereas those ...”

“... We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online ...”

“... will recognise that the question of who one is is always dialogical, and stop behaving like the man in Wittgenstein who, when asked how tall he was, responded by placing his hand on top of his head. In Planet of the Apes, the gung-ho American hero arrives at the inconceivably remote planet to find some of the younger apes playing basketball. It’s a bit ...”

“... oneself as a member of a family. There thus appeared two kinds of desire – one for the anonymous man, one for the family man.Let me now say something about what the word ‘solitude’ means. We know three solitudes in society. We know a solitude imposed by power. This is the solitude of isolation, the solitude of ...”

“... it was a servant of the powerful Okurasho, the ‘Treasury Ministry’, just as the Banque de France was a slave of the Ministry of Finance. As such, both were subject to the corrupting influence – dare one say it – of political decisions, though in truth both ministries are ultra-conservative élite strongholds, scarcely exposed to the vagaries of ...”

“... 20 in Scotland, 14 in England, nine in Ireland, three in Wales, and one in the Isle of Man. In the US I have found cards of 16 ‘Meetings of the Waters’, in Canada six, in New South Wales three. Some of these places gave rise to multiple cards: I stopped collecting cards of Avoca at 31, of Killarney at 26, of the Greta and Tees at 15, and so ...”

“... road and flip over, killing Metzger as well as himself. (Kligman survived and took up with Willem de Kooning.)Undeterred, Greenberg went on to steer more of his protégés to the Sullivan Institute. It soon became almost obligatory for artists seeking his approval to get a Sullivanian therapist: ‘There was pressure,’ the sculptor James Wolfe recalled, but ...”

“... name is on most of the Phaidon books somewhere, and looms large on his personal tour de force, Fünfhundert Selbstporträts of 1936. There was an English version but I have seldom seen it outside a library. In a London bookshop I recently found the German original complete with dust-wrappers and the loose tissues protecting the colour plates, as ...”

“... court system – were perceived merely as national quirks.One wouldn’t expect this reasonable man to threaten the world with nuclear weapons. But now the tragedy of Ukraine has become a terrible reality, it must be understood that Putin is not an anomaly, but part of a global market society dominated by naked interests. It should also finally be ...”

“... copper in size eleven shoes, but not the queers: ‘to my mind the stronger and the bigger the man the more interested they are in getting to know the other side of him.’ Once he had a chap who was interested in him: ‘I gave him a smile,’ and the man followed Butcher right across town and in at the back door of the ...”

“... long since reanimated as desirable ‘resi’, on which my grandfather had his first job (‘A man’s job, at fourteen’) – and in a few minutes you reach a clutch of houses which might have been grafted from a garden city. These ‘cottages’ – in fact substantial terraces and semis – are set back from the road, with ample room for gardens, front ...”

“... D.H. Lawrence of Sons and Lovers, a book he sometimes taught. There, the young Lawrence figure, Paul Morel, long at odds with his father, also feels when his mother dies an irresistible relief from emotional smothering, even though he adored and had tended her. It is symptomatic of Atlas’s uptight, prejudicial feelings about Bellow, and particularly about ...”

“... a book, spoken a speech?’). Even so, the story remains a contest between Moby Dick, the thinking man’s whale, in his ‘pyramidal silence’, and Captain Ahab, the thinking whale’s man. For Melville, as for Chase, malice is the authentic mark of the whale’s intelligence. A century and a half after the book was ...”

“... the belief in America as the city on a hill to which all yearn to travel, the superpower whose fin-de-siècle worries that its imperial powers were atrophying as those of other empires had done (see Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) were allayed by victory in the Cold War and the subsequent discovery ...”

“... seeming so dark or sordid a journey. The hotels were white. ‘They come here to die,’ wrote the man who laid out the gardens by the pier at Bournemouth. ‘Let us make death beautiful.’ The Royal National Sanitarium opened in 1855, followed by specialised ‘homes’ for invalid ladies, or for consumptives who invaded the town on account of the ...”