“... to his studio and gave him an easel, large sheets of paper and materials to work with. Beegan took to filling the paper with drawings of men and animals, and writing out abstruse, disconnected thoughts, or maybe messages. ‘This man lived in a world of his own. He did many similar drawings, covered with esoteric writing which obviously had a private ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on to accuse the English of betraying their precious inheritance. The rot began, he said, with John Stuart Mill, who started off as a liberal but went on to swallow a toxic draught of German metaphysics and then succumbed to the feminist wiles of Harriet Taylor, who married him and led him astray. Under Taylor’s tutelage, it seems, Mill ‘slid slowly ...”

“... had saved him from self-destruction through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor ...”

“... of Indian mystical thought and a self-styled PhD in Eastern philosophy – part of his studies took place, if that’s the right term, at ‘Astral University’. In his heyday between the Thirties and Fifties, P.B. published a series of books on Indian mysticism, including A Search in Secret India, The Secret Path, A Message from Arunachala, A Hermit in ...”

“... monuments salvaged by Alexandre Lenoir together with treasures confiscated by the state. It took Lenoir several years to convert this repository into one of the most influential displays ever devised in a museum: the religious and royalist past that the revolution had endeavoured to destroy was given chronological order, an evocative setting and a ...”

“... and editors. Other leading figures also do both, including, in this country, Christopher Ricks and John Carey. But most critics in good repute don’t seem to want to edit, and wouldn’t be any good if they tried. The provocative element in McGann’s position for them will be his serious belief in the centrality of the role of the editor. He goes back to the ...”

“... the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took possession of me.’ A recent series of Guardian columns in praise of Herbert by an Anglican minister called Miranda Threlfall-Holmes credits his poems with leading her from teenage atheism towards Christianity. ‘They left me with the sense that I was ...”

“... sight of fertile land, making generalisations about peasant life difficult. Buñuel’s biographer John Baxter writes about Las Hurdes: ‘The lowlands, Las Hurdes Bajas, were lush and prosperous, but the flinty uplands behind them, Las Hurdes Altas, were among the most deprived areas in Spain. The peasants … lived in medieval conditions, ravaged by ...”

“... room and ordered the servants to withdraw ... Spurred on by the frenzy of his lust, he took his daughter’s virginity by force, in spite of her lengthy resistance.’ After the rape, the girl (who remains nameless) wants to kill herself, but her nurse (in romance and fairy tale, nurses almost always advance the immoralist argument for ...”

“... with Descartes. By contrast, the Recent era started when philosophy, in Richard Rorty’s phrase, took the ‘linguistic turn’. So it started with Frege or Russell, or early Wittgenstein, or the Vienna Circle; take your pick. Modern philosophy was mostly about epistemology: it wanted to understand what makes knowledge possible. Recent philosophy is mostly ...”

“... Ministry of Fuel and Power, with Shinwell as his chief. They did not get on, and when Gaitskell took Shinwell’s place after the fuel crisis of 1947, he earned a major enemy for many years to come. But what the diary reveals, more clearly than I have seen elsewhere, is the important part that Gaitskell, though not a full member of the Cabinet, played ...”

“... next book, A Palace for a King (1980), written in collaboration with a ‘plain’ historian, John Elliott, studied the court of Philip IV and the building of the Palace of the Buen Retiro on the outskirts of Madrid. Behind the enterprise loomed the massive figure of Philip’s first minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares. Olivares ...”

“... We get a glimpse of Cambridge high life: the gluttony and gambling – swans for the eating, Van John all night, with ‘the Dr’ picking up the tabs. Darwin laughed modestly at the paralysis of his faculties through inertia, but the image of enforced idleness at Christ’s is misleading. There was riding (his horse came up too), but more important he was ...”

“... thousand people. The disaster, all the preachers said, was God’s punishment for sinfulness. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, saw it as divine vengeance for the cruelties of the Portuguese Inquisition. He had identified a minor earthquake near a racecourse in Yorkshire as another such intervention: God ‘purposely chose such a place, where there ...”