“... has been blessed with a fine landscape, and God in his providence has arranged the mountains in a ring around the coastline in an egregiously unsuccessful attempt to stop the natives from getting out. Irish writers in the 19th century, however, were not remarkable for their appreciation of Nature as a source of beauty. There is no Irish equivalent of ...”

“... has wonderful titles: ‘Your News Hour Is Now Two Hours’ or ‘Cardio Room, Young Women’s Christian Association’ or ‘Your Premiums Will Never Increase’. As good as anything by Eno). I am floundering. The only reservation I have about the book is that it leaves out a number of other, equally marvellous poems. Perhaps that’s where I should ...”

“... and 10:04 incorporate passages of literary and art criticism (on John Ashbery’s poems, or Christian Marclay’s film The Clock) into their narratives, some of it taken almost verbatim from Lerner’s own published essays. It’s a remarkable thing to create a narrator who can credibly launch into actual written criticism in a way that seems natural ...”

“... like Kolakowski’s image of Communist Russia, and though such remarks have a hard-headed radical ring to them they do nothing to help us understand Chaucer or Langland or their age. In an earlier and much better book, Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory (1975), Aers has argued that the debate among medievalists over ...”

“... it, and it was not until October 2000 that it was brought into force. By then all hats were in the ring: liberal opinion had hailed a new dawn, and conservative opinion, both left and right, had predicted a bonanza for cranks and lawyers. It was a safe bet that neither would be proved wholly right, but there was no hope, and there will be none for a few years ...”

“... Princess Charlotte’s funeral. Below him through the sunny autumn mist he heard the church bells ring then all at once subside – ‘a distant sinking like aeolian harps and I immediately imagined the people all in at prayer’. The Regency city was a tolerant, prosperous place. It was rich and stable while the Continent suffered in the aftermath of ...”

“... and the possible derivation of late accounts like Snorri’s from learned European sources, Christian, Neoplatonic and even Judaic. This, though, turns attention away from the consistently idiosyncratic nature of the myths, which is the first thing everyone notices about them. The reason for O’Donoghue’s caution becomes clear in the book’s final ...”

“... remotely like that of the man with the tonsure? But brilliant, knowing … And more deeply Christian (if that’s what one wanted, and surely one did) than even dear Bouts. More compassionate and ironic about our exit from original sin. More modern in its picture of sanctity.Bosch​ – speaking now to the heart of his work, to the people in the ...”

“... was known in the neighbourhood as a loner who collected odds and ends, as a silent member of the Christian Science Church, as a ‘scary kook’, as a haunted-looking man who was friendly to children. One visitor to Utopia Parkway recalls seeing a little girl walking across the lawn towards Cornell. She was holding one of his boxes. ‘I’m tired of this ...”

“... Yes, sir, banknotes, the largest denomination that existed in France then, which was enormous.’ Christian Zervos is recollecting the day that Picasso took him, as a favoured confidant, to his vaults in the Banque de France. The fortune Zervos was allowed to glimpse in the mid-1930s had ridden out the Wall Street crash, and had been accumulating since before ...”

“... against the weak and helpless, and an enemy to tyrannical movements, whether Communist, Fascist or Christian fundamentalist. It took her 50 years to turn the events of 1927, on which she took copious and passionate notes, into a jumbled, emotional piece, ‘The Never-Ending Wrong’, published in 1977, and as much about memory’s slipperiness as about what ...”

“... throughout the exhibition, hoards and weapons: axes, spearheads, swords and shields, helmets and ring mail. The smith clearly took as much pride in his work as the carpenter. The Vale of York hoard, which dates from the 920s, contains silver coins, a Frankish liturgical cup, arm rings and what’s called ‘hack silver’. Sunhild Kleingärtner and Gareth ...”

“... non-existent) early 17th-century brotherhood. A German work of 1616, The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, often linked to the Rosicrucians, was a romantic allegory swirling with symbols of purification and transformation. Alchemists aimed to extract purity from nature’s corruption, clarity from confusion, and called the refinement of chemical ...”

“... by different cultures – but treats the dead primarily as a philosophical problem, following Christian thinkers from Boethius to Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus as they wrestle with the form/matter opposition inherited from Aristotle and riddle out where to place Christ’s body in such a scheme. Whether or not the corpse is a nonperson, it resembles a ...”

“... than anyone is of their nails growing.’ It’s revealing that the loam-moulder uses Yorke’s Christian name: obviously his upper-class provenance wasn’t held against him. There was a similar familiarity from other members of the firm in the recent BBC 2 Bookmark programme on Green. Green’s time at Birmingham was clearly the basis of his lifelong ...”