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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Antonine principate. The 15th and 16th chapters, which conclude the volume with a survey of Christian history before the victory of Constantine, instantly occasioned a fierce controversy over Gibbon’s evident unbelief and his use of irony to convey it, so that his writings on the history of the Church have been viewed through the glass of this ...”

“... Just under forty years ago David Erdman provided for William Blake historical contexts in abundance in Blake: Prophet against Empire (1954). It was a remarkable work of literary detection, which still dominates the field. Some Blake readers have felt that his attribution of correspondence between text and contemporaneous events was over-literal (as well as hazardous), and Jon Mee is one of these ...”

“... planetary orbits by thinking God’s thoughts after him, but obstructive in the 19th century, when William Whewell, Louis Agassiz and Richard Owen resisted the transmutation of species. Desmond’s informed analysis points to a more subtle conclusion. An idealist metaphysic may not have contributed to the science of evolutionary mechanics, but it did make a ...”

“... told, much less filmed, so perhaps it is worth restating the main lines. In 1787, Lieutenant William Bligh, RN, aged 33, was given the command of HM Armed Vessel Bounty of 215 tons and four four-pounder guns, a merchantman bought by the Navy Board and fitted up with the help of Sir Joseph Banks, who was then guiding Kew towards its glorious future, as a ...”

“... common word for fascism would have been a Russian one, not an Italian one … Major General William Graves, who commanded the American Expeditionary Force during the 1918 invasion of Siberia (an event thoroughly airbrushed from all American textbooks), wrote in his memoirs about the pervasive, lethal anti-Semitism that dominated the Russian right wing ...”