Suppose we met Euclid on Westminster Bridge, and he took us aside and confessed to us that whilst he regarded parallelograms and rhomboids with an indifference bordering on contempt, for isosceles triangles he cherished a wild romantic devotion. Suppose he asked us to accompany him to the nearest music-shop, and there purchased a guitar in order that he might worthily sing to us the radiant beauty and the radiant goodness of isosceles triangles. As men we should, I hope, respect his enthusiasm, and encourage his enthusiasm, and catch his enthusiasm. But as seekers after truth we should be compelled to regard with a dark suspicion, and to check with the most anxious care, every fact that he told us about isosceles triangles.

Esteban had a taste for the imaginative and fantastic, and would day-dream for hours in front of pictures by modern artists representing monsters, spectral horses, or impossible scenes – a tree-man with fingers sprouting from him, a cupboard-man with empty drawers coming out of his stomach.

Suppose that you find yourself in the presence of a closed box, and in communication with God.

It’s extremely hard to purify the brain, and we desperately need your help.

Instead he breaches my trust and pillages their consciences with a pathetically amoral approach to an incredibly powerful addictive drug – beverage alcohol.

Frequently compared to Gone with the Wind, Forever Amber is the other great historical romance, outselling every other American novel of the 1940s – despite being banned in Boston for its sheer sexiness. A book to read and reread, this edition brings back to print an unforgettable romance and a timeless masterpiece.

He’s carsexual, and not in the car-as-in-Carly sense.

In 1963, for example, Susan Sontag dismissed Aron as “a man deranged by German philosophy belatedly converting to Anglo-Saxon empiricism and common sense under the name of `Mediterranean’ virtue.”

He might have speculated about the psychological puzzle presented by a group of sybaritic eccentrics engaging in desiccated activities like “systems analysis” and trying to turn the foibles of the rest of humanity into data points.

He was a jocular, gregarious giant who chattered on about fallout shelters, megaton bombs, and the incineration of millions.