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“... Necropolis.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The sign could say: “Up here, something did happen to Andrew O’Hagan. Like each of us, he wondered if it would happen. And it did.”’ Something happened to my second ever schoolteacher, Mrs Wallace. We saw her totally somethinged in her coffin under a huge crucifix of Jesus Christ, to whom, by the look of the ...”

“... mainstream French democracy than the American-style ‘populism’ practised by politicians from Andrew Jackson to George W. Bush. The word populiste is a deadly insult, most recently deployed by socialists and Chiraquiens alike against anyone who dares interpret the result of the referendum on the European Constitution as a vote of no confidence in the ...”

“... and each of whom she tended like a lone flower. Gerard, the elder brother, was the family saint, the town saint, and he would turn out to be the holy face in a lot of Jack’s later writing. He died at the age of ten when Jack was four. Nuns filed into the house to see the dead boy; family and friends talked for ...”

“... across the Soviet Union at night. The first foreigner to fly on the Maxim Gorky was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on 17 May 1935. Sitting in the cabin, Saint-Exupéry imagined himself on the balcony of a hotel set in the sky. The very next day, the Maxim Gorky collided with another plane during a propaganda flight over ...”

“... Pückler attended in London is worthy of the Carry On films. And in Dublin he was captivated by Andrew Ducrow, wearing a pale body-stocking, moving gracefully from the imitation of one famous antique sculpture to another, freezing as if turned to marble as he achieved each pose, the finale being the Dying Gladiator (whose last thoughts had been divined and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... bedroom, Edward Hopper’s Sun in an Empty Room, Adolf Menzel’s open window and blowing curtain, Andrew Wyeth’s New England rooms full of cold, hard light, Hammershøi’s frugal Danish ones and Van Gogh’s narrow bedroom: these are pictures you might choose if exiled to a desert island. Thinking of the inviting effect such paintings have I went looking ...”

“... managed to come up with sentences like these again and again: I am lonely. I cannot be a female saint. I want the one I want. He is the one I picked out from the world. I picked him out in cold deliberation. But the passion was not cold. It kindled me. It kindled the world. Love, love, give my heart ease, put your arms round me, give my heart ease. Feel the ...”

“... on a warped version of two classic zero-sum arguments. Invoking Malthus, surely the patron saint of zero-sumness, he recognised the inevitability of a struggle for existence and posited that only those individuals making the most effective use of their faculties would survive. Because organisms have only a finite set of resources to draw on, Spencer ...”

“... think of Charles Bovary, a fool raised by what he endures, or Princess Diana, the patron saint of non-swots – is a connection that lies too deep for tears in these biographies. Yes, they are simple-hearted bids for approval, but there is also something vicious in the journeyings of self-glory that they represent, something rapacious and nearly ...”

“... the date was 31 October 1517. The main actor belonged to a religious Order known as the Hermits of Saint Augustine, Martin Luther by name, though he also tried out a hybrid Greek/Latin polish for his surname by dressing it up as ‘Eleutherius’, ‘the freed man’. This kind of personal rebranding was a humanist affectation then common among university ...”

“... running out of rhythm and never speaking in tongues. It likes Philip Larkin, the unlikely patron saint of self-help, though it’s amusing to consider how untouched he would be to find his effusions on hopeless love, coming death and boredom deployed in a continuing effort to floss the minds of the readers of the Mail on Sunday. I have now read a great many ...”

“... firms were queuing up for a slice of the action. The old town houses and merchant stores of Saint Helier were giving way to office blocks and car parks, and the island’s labour market was so overheated that unqualified school-leavers were being paid higher salaries than graduates on mainland Britain. Porsches, Jaguars and BMWs were the favourite cars ...”

“... develop between Hitchens and the Bellows.’) And Bellow himself would go on to be a patron saint of modern novelists who saw themselves working hard in the uplands of style and in the lowlands of urban speech. He is loved as an innovator, a perfectionist, and so he should be, yet he is likely always to be a master who is without a single published ...”

“... girl, dancer to actress, brunette to blonde, actress to politician, President’s wife to secular saint. But none of this is easy to explain, and all of it turns to myth at the slightest touch. Even her body had its long adventures: laboriously embalmed at her death in 1952, it began its mysterious travels when Perón fell in 1955, was dug up in Italy in ...”