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“... as any on which to hang thoughts about Philip Guston is San Clemente, painted in 1975. It shows Richard Nixon on the Californian shore. His pink, phallic nose droops between gross, grey, stubbled testicular cheeks. A tear runs down one of them. Bloodshot eyes swivel from under a black hedge of eyebrow. He looks back and down towards his ...”

“... of one of Bridget Riley’s prismatically divided, coloured abstracts. But these images do not read as flat surfaces; they are accounts of a three-dimensional world. The field is divided into shards and lozenges: the faceted forms of Cubist painting combine with the angled lines and rectangles of the Russian Suprematists. You identify, quite quickly, what ...”

“... important found no place in the novel’s scheme. Towards the end of the book the hero read in his Penguin Marcus Aurelius the gloomy aphorism that human life is no more than sperm and ashes, and felt no sympathy for it. The modest richness of his day refuted this downbeat Roman smugness. A highly mannered style seems to achieve its effects almost ...”

“... predeceased his sister by some 35 years. As a long-ago anarchist, libertarian, hippie (etc) I’d read a bit of Nietzsche, but it’s true that I knew nothing about the Nietzsche Archive and wasn’t even aware that he had a sister. Unfortunately, Diethe, though she has clearly spent a working life in the Nietzsche Archive, is unable to organise or present ...”

“... and was ‘briefly noted’ in the New Yorker. It sold around 1700 copies: those who wanted to read about a doleful scholar with a problematic wife didn’t show up en masse until September, when Viking also published Saul Bellow’s Herzog. In February 1966, however, an appreciation by Irving Howe of Williams’s ‘serious, beautiful and affecting ...”

“... nominalist and don’t for a moment believe in Plato’s Ideas or even many of his ideas, but I read him avidly and can’t take much Aristotle. Most of Murdoch’s more-or-less contemporaries in Oxford were friends of Aristotle, and they hardly get a look in. The exception is the late A.J. Ayer, whose cameo appearance is just right. ‘I first ...”

“... and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in brilliant emendations of the text of Aeschylus. In 1662 Richard Bentley, one of the greatest critical scholars, was born near Wakefield. In 1700 he became Master of Trinity, and despite continual battles with the fellows survived until the age of 80. Bentley was an outstanding textual critic. His famous edition of ...”

“... in Alistair Cooke’s great account of the time, Generation on Trial. He was the man who made Richard Nixon’s self-serving book, Six Crises (a ‘campaign book’ for an entire career), possible in the first place. Witness, his own work, had a marked influence on Arthur Koestler and on Czeslaw Milosz and is, indeed, the nativist American equivalent of ...”

“... It is not, he says, ‘the authoritative record of events put down as they actually occurred’. Richard Mullen and Hall use An Autobiography extensively, but tactfully (and sometimes tacitly) correct its account. Super, Mullen and Hall are skilled biographers, and each has his particular edge. Hall has edited the letters, and creates the most fluent ...”

“... held court alone, as Syberberg’s chilling cinematic portrait of her attests. Hitler and Richard Strauss, Toscanini and Houston Stewart Chamberlain came there, as well as a whole host of lesser figures, sycophants, geniuses, philosophers, charlatans, and professional Wagnerians of every stripe and calibre.One says all this about the bewildering ...”

“... the university and the broader public. Many of them were historians, including Daniel Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Invocations of history punctuated debates over the Cold War, civil rights and Vietnam. But none of these ‘public intellectuals’ reached a larger audience or had a greater social and political impact than C. Vann ...”

“... the Independent Group, the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his ...”

“... in 1964. Suu Kyi’s student years are among the best documented and the most entertaining to read about. She represented a type which is forgotten in conventional reminiscence of the 1960s: passionate, idealistic, but determinedly and almost aggressively chaste in the face of new fashions in sexual liberation. Her college, St Hugh’s, was, in the words ...”

“... number is getting the wrong end of the journalistic stick. Not that all journalists have actually read Scoop. Once, many years ago, when I was immured in an un-newsworthy Latin American city at the insistence of my foreign editor, I tried to suggest that it was time to move on by sending him the immortal cable front Waugh’s novel: ‘Weather here lovely, no ...”

“... analyst would say about this one. In another essay, Solomon devastatingly dismantles Editha and Richard Sterba’s aggressive theory about Beethoven’s alleged homosexual interest in his nephew. Throughout the book we are aware of Solomon’s high intelligence, the immense width of his reading and his often shrewd perceptions, as well as his deeply ...”