“... that of poet. It is also the story of a middle-aged man publicly confirming his identity as a Christian. Sisson compares joining the Church of England to giving oneself up to the police. ‘I had committed the crime – if it is one – of yielding to the persuasions of the Creed, some time before, gradually, I am not sure when.’ While acknowledging ...”

“... This is From Early Life by the oldest of the five authors, the novelist and scientist ‘William Cooper’: he was born in 1910 and brought up (as Harry Hoff) in the town of Crewe in Cheshire. Seniors in his family were determined chapel-goers, but Cooper-Hoff looks back at his childhood, over eighty years, with the quiet smile of a tolerant ...”

“... chivalric ideal in modern society, nor was it to be the last. Already, in 1825, the tall tower of William Beckford’s new baronial hall. Font-hill Abbey, had collapsed without warning. A few years after the Eglinton debacle, one of the day’s leading artists, William Dyce, was commissioned to paint allegorical frescoes on ...”

“... a member of the Church of England who supported the High Church reforms carried out by William Laud, the archbishop of Canterbury. This leaves us with the question: when did Milton become Milton? Nicholas McDowell’s new study, Poet of Revolution, tries to account for Milton’s transformation from ‘obscure student poet in the early ...”

“... 4. plants the seeds of voluntarism in the doctrine of faith’. In England, the great theologian William Perkins followed Beza (Chapter Four, passim). All predestinarian theologians have to face the problem of how one can be assured of salvation. For Calvin, faith comes only from without, as a divine gift; assurance and faith are in effect the same ...”

“... of plague deaths in the city, achieved by paying informers to record the exact number of Muslim, Christian and Jewish funerals (the population was then about 80 per cent Sunni Muslim, 15 per cent Christian and 5 per cent Jewish).For a reader with less appetite for Enlightenment encyclopedias, the spice comes from the ...”

“... on the popular imagination of Christ and of His Passion. Yet his insistent denial of pagan or sub-Christian elements within lay religion may sometimes look like special pleading. An old man of Cartmel, told in James I’s reign of Jesus Christ and His saving power, remarked: ‘I think I heard of that man ... once in a play at Kendal called Corpus Christi ...”

“... to his readers. One difficulty he does not surmount, I think, is his inability to share Jonson’s Christian piety. But more revealing in relation to his own poetry is the difficulty he has with the famous forthrightness of Jonson’s not necessarily Christian affirmation: Not to know vice at all, and keepe true state, Is ...”

“... Church of the Holy Sepulchre, or the outward appearance of the Dome of the Rock, which Christian tour-guides in Jerusalem then confidently pointed out to pilgrims as the Temple of Solomon. In more Protestant mood, you could linger in Norwich, where 17th-century Congregationalists endowed the façade of their elegant Old Meeting House with echoes of ...”

“... to India. That he came is an ancient tradition in India, and the core belief of a thriving Christian community there. According to the Mar Thoma Nazranis or St Thomas Christians of Kerala, whose current membership is about one million, the apostle landed on the Malabar coast a couple of decades after the execution of Jesus. His point of entry ...”

“... Crime is largely an activity of the poor, partly because the rich usually decide what crime is – William Godwin defined crime as ‘those offences which the wealthier part of the community have no temptation to commit’ – and partly because of the social conditions under which they live. In the 18th century those conditions were so bad that the novelist ...”

“... years before he married, and it is now the Edward James foundation. Edward was probably given his Christian name because his mother was an illegitimate daughter of Edward VII. At Eton and Oxford there was always someone in love with him, but because of his preoccupation with the horrors of homosexuality, he suppressed his feelings and never went beyond a ...”

“... until 1892. He was more of a socialist than a Liberal, however, influenced by H.M. Hyndman and William Morris, a friend of Keir Hardie. Above all, he reacted with fierce individualism to the cruelties, inequalities, snobberies and hypocrisies he encountered on both sides of the Atlantic. He was also fiercely anti-puritan. In later life, he became more and ...”

“... Viking Age was succeeded within three weeks by the start of a Second Age, with the victory of William of Normandy at Hastings. By 1100, Norman princes ruled not only England and most of Wales, with much of Scotland and Ireland soon to follow, but also Apulia and Calabria in southern Italy, and Sicily. They had started the process of picking off parts of ...”

“... and Harold Bloom. To be sure, this response will seem pusillanimous. When believers, Jewish or Christian, read or hear what they take to be Holy Writ, it’s supposed that they respond complacently. But some of them at least respond needfully and in terror. The secularist may despise them for that: but at least their frame mind needs to be acknowledged and ...”