“... and the incarnationalist and Christian-socialist teachings of Lamennais and Frederick Maurice). Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh (1857) dismissed Comte’s doctrines as intrinsically ‘absurd’; yet the poem centred on the heroic tragedy of a man who practised the supreme positivist virtue of ‘altruism’ or ‘sacrifice for others’, at the ...”

“... claim to the title to understand the tensions which were at stake. Already by the reign of Elizabeth I, it was recognised that a university MA made a man a gentleman, whatever his pedigree might be. That is the assumption on which today’s educational system is built: it is choosing the gentlemen (and the ladies also) of the next generation’s social ...”

“... bystander and suggested he run along the deck to see if any stray pieces of ice had come on board. Elizabeth Eustis and Martha Eustis Stevenson, sisters from Haverford, Pennsylvania, travelling first-class, were asleep in their cabin. The collision, though almost soundless – ‘like tearing a strip of calico, nothing more’ – woke them up. ...”

“... and services on one side and family apartments on the other.The Renaissance finally arrived during Elizabeth’s reign. She was less greedy for buildings than her father and was a patron by proxy, shrewdly encouraging ambitious courtiers to build glamorous houses for her entertainment, rather than paying for them herself. When she gave Kenilworth Castle to her ...”

“... conversed with you, he look’t into your very thoughts.’ That the corpse of Robert Braybrook, bishop of London (d. 1404) ‘was like a preserved fish: uncorrupted except for the ears and pudenda’. (Aubrey visited after the roof of St Paul’s fell in during the 1666 fire, causing the lead coffins to break open.) Most audible of all, perhaps, is ...”

“... and changed in exactly the same manner. Davie has no other reason to offer as to why he finds Bishop Ken’s hymn inferior, save that it appeals to sentimental associations (described in a Kipling story) which Davie dismisses as ‘mawkish’. One is left on one’s own to decide why Davie really dislikes Ken’s hymn. Perhaps it is because of a certain ...”

“... been against “general warrants”.’ The all-premises warrant is a prime example of how, as the Bishop of Southwark put it, ‘yesterday’s unthinkable restriction becomes today’s accepted practice’. To be fair, Pratt’s concern was that general warrants gave a right to the agents of the state to search the premises of anyone at all on whom their ...”

“... wife, whose name has never been recorded, had died, leaving him four children. His second wife, Elizabeth, courageous and pious like his first, presented a petition to secure his release. Angered by the callous attitude of one of the Justices of the Peace, and by the mockery of several bystanders, she denounced the proceedings: ‘Because he is a ...”

“... age of forty, though by the 1510s he begins to come a little more into focus. He married his wife, Elizabeth, probably a few years after Henry’s accession in 1509. They had two daughters, Anne and Grace, and a son, Gregory, born in 1519 or 1520. At some point in the 1520s Elizabeth’s mother, Mercy (the Mistress Prior ...”

“... successful in the whole collection, deals with ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign the Anglican clergyman Samuel Harsnett, chaplain to the Bishop of London (and himself a future Archbishop of York), published an attack on Catholic exorcists in general and on the Jesuit William Weston in ...”

“... Jesus, no good angels, only a hell there was, and devils to carry me thither’. We also hear of Elizabeth, wife of the Nonconformist minister Oliver Heywood, who battled throughout her life with ‘the unbeleefe of her own heart’. But these are exceptions that seem to prove Hunter’s rule that Christian doubt differs from the rational scepticism of the ...”

“... the claim that one’s own nation had inherited Roman dominion and classical learning. It is what Bishop Berkeley had in mind much later when he wrote: ‘Westward the course of empire takes its way.’ Berkeley believed so firmly in the idea that he left his library to Yale and Harvard and his name to a great Californian university. And it is from ...”

“... spread, and many local figures gathered to put questions to the ghost through the little girl; the bishop sent a questionnaire, to which William, prompted by Saint Michael who had appeared in support, gave full replies – about death, the afterlife and the structure of heaven and hell. He uses the word ‘purgatory’ – an early instance of the noun – and ...”

“... on top of the daughter he had fathered before he married, he had himself had two children by Lady Elizabeth Foster (Bess); according to the double standards of the day that, however, was fully acceptable, and the Duke’s bastards by Bess were brought up alongside his legitimate children. Rather more unusually, Bess, too, lived in Devonshire House with the ...”

“... On​ 12 March 1455, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, soon to be Pope Pius II but then bishop of Siena, wrote to his friend Juan de Carvajal, a Spanish cardinal in Rome, describing a ‘viro mirabili’ (miraculous man) he had seen in the market in Frankfurt. The man was selling Bibles in numbers too large to have been the work of manuscript production: I have not seen complete Bibles, but several quires belonging to different books [of the Bible], exceedingly clean and correct in their script, and without error, which Your Grace could read effortlessly, even without glasses ...”