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“... minister for much of the reign, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, such a favourite? In this volume, Paul Hammer distinguishes his position from that of a courtier-favourite such as, above all, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, but for Brockliss, Burghley fits the category of ‘minister-favourite’, which, so far as he is concerned, is what this book is all ...”

“... his portrait and send it to him, but the delight is principally because the picture by ‘one Paul of Verona’, when it finally arrives, reminds Languet of what Sidney looks like, not on account of any artistic qualities the portrait may have possessed. Languet attaches the picture to a board, and gazes at it while writing to Sidney, as in a primitive ...”

“... secular times, it is in the negative theology of these Oedipal offspring of Mother Church, who hammer their fists on her bosom with all the passionate intensity of the true believer. In any case, being a Catholic is as much a cultural as a religious affair: to abandon the church altogether would be like changing your accent or taste for curried eggs. The ...”

“... eyebrow, each movement more pronounced than the last – and relaxes again only when he brings the hammer down for a sale. There is a constant low hubbub that fades only for the big money. ‘I’ll start at 20 million,’ he announces quietly to open the bidding for Bacon’s Triptych 1974-77, the last of the paintings Bacon made in the wake of the suicide of ...”

“... He’s my enemy,’ Jane Auer recalled telling a friend when she first met Paul Bowles. But she immediately followed him to Mexico even so and, though she had been and would always be much more drawn to women, married him less than a year later. The instinct to court an ‘enemy’ rather than an admirer may have been a shrewd one: it seems to have been especially difficult for Bowles’s admirers to do her justice ...”

“... Long before the sin of Orientalism was discovered, Paul Bowles had frequently been guilty of it, in word, in thought and in deed. In his first stories, for example, the natives are shining examples of naked otherness, created partly to refresh our view concerning the mixture of simplicity, guile and sexual beauty available in remote places ...”

“... things look became integral to Warhol’s visual practice, sometimes with striking results. ‘Hammer and Sickle’ (1976) Whatever is going on optically, these ‘late’ works suggest the eventual dangers of scale. It is no coincidence that they are all one-offs: his instincts were surer in serial form, whether as painter or printer. Rather than any ...”

“... in which for a few years Storey, a muscle-bound Defarge, earned his bread swinging a 14-pound hammer, pitching and striking tents for the champagne parties of his social superiors (it supplies the setting for his play The Contractor); the Slade School, which appears under various pseudonyms, as does his native Wakefield; the years of poverty before This ...”

“... an account of the genesis of the Fifth Symphony. This highly popular piece with its ‘Thor’s hammer blow’ finale is often seen as a retreat from the dissonance of its predecessor, but in it he developed the technique of structural accelerando to compact four movements into three and thus prepared the way for the Seventh Symphony. The Fifth ...”

“... you’ve seen the painting – which was for a long time held by his family, and then by Armand Hammer (it has been at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles since 1991) – you have probably never heard of Dr Pozzi. That is because, unlike his friends, who tended to be ...”

“... else is going on. Take the satire. In The Closed Circle it turns out that The Rotters’ Club’s Paul Trotter, who at the age of nine was a precocious admirer of Mrs Thatcher and a rabid free-marketeer, has grown up to become a New Labour MP. Spot on, perhaps, as a characterisation of the Blairite hidden agenda. But this is where the satire ends: ...”

“... the rides to drink milk at the estate saw mills, those who had ears might have heard the clang of hammer and sickle.’ Nor was she hoodwinked or hypnotised, as Mary was, by the apparent security and comforts of middle-class Early Victorian England. She saw, understood and supported what was happening down below. While Mary and her friends fled London or ...”

“... who rose from private in the Honourable Artillery Company, was a devout Christian who launched the Hammer House of Horror (Sir James Carreras). All demonstrated that a spell in uniform, as the sovereign’s trusty and well-beloved, never cramped a creative talent, and perhaps that a creative talent never cramped a military one. The singularity of their careers ...”

“... always a background tinge of alarm: in front of the cases these brain-states come and go. Paul de Man, glossing Rousseau, points out helpfully that ‘giant’, as we have the word now, is a kind of back-formation from (normal-proportion) ‘man’, and that the original fear-filled figure for the Other-that-is-ourself which Rousseau had in mind would ...”

“... none as extreme as Miriam’s U-turn about the deer-hoof reading lamp. Angela, the mother in ‘Hammer’, warily prepares to welcome her ferocious 16-year-old daughter Darleen home for a visit. Hopes for a reconciliation seem vanishingly small, to judge from their pre-visit phone conversation (‘I’m hanging up, Mummy. You can continue with your ...”