Elie’s grand theme is the “crypto-religious” turn in contemporary culture, the preservation of forms and rituals of religion in art and music even after the foundations of faith are seemingly abandoned. These are what Lionel Trilling (not mentioned either, but might usefully have been) called “pieties”, observances without content.

One doesn’t expect to encounter hæcceitas in a discussion of Andy Warhol. To be fair to Paul Elie, Duns Scotus is one of the few faces not to appear in this richly peopled survey, largely because he wasn’t around in the Eighties, but Elie persuasively argues that Warhol’s Coke bottles and Brillo boxes are deliberately literal renderings of the “thisness” of things, while his false-colour silkscreen portraits make him the iconographer of Pop. This is the Warhol who ran to church between Masses to pray [and] who was known in The Factory as “the Pope” .

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