“... heroism. The only ‘female being’ the boy knows is his dog Immacolatella, a name recalling the Christian tradition of pious and devoted femininity. The dog is as besotted with her master as Arturo is with his father, or as the Amalfitano was with the young Wilhelm. Morante exposes but also seems to take pleasure in capturing the misogyny and machismo of ...”

“... mobile young London physician ‘to make all the Noise and Bustle you can, to make the whole Town ring of you if possible: So that every one in it may know, that there is in Being, and here in Town too, such a Physician’. One way to make such a noise was to be seen in the fastest and most fashionable medical and literary circles, hoping for a reflected ...”

“... lovers into birds; a terrifying encounter with the mummified effigy of King Solomon and his magic ring, guarded by giant serpents; a descent into the underworld; a young lover who sits disconsolate after the death of his beloved from a snake bite. Kilito has often returned to The Arabian Nights in fine-grained studies with a quixotic approach to imagery and ...”

“... tree records only that she was alive at the time of the 1901 census. Her brothers were all good Christian men: one was ordained in the Church of England; another was a Unitarian deacon. I’m sure they all thought her plight, when they thought about her at all, terribly sad; but I doubt it ever crossed any of their minds that what they’d done to her might ...”

“... am suspicious of, the possession theory. This story goes that the addict is like any other poor Christian, but he’s been taken by the devil. His addiction is not something he could choose (after all, it certainly isn’t something he would choose), and therefore he can’t be blamed for it. Unsurprisingly, some finessing of the notion of blame often takes ...”

“... for Kate, the unrequited love of his life, who died of the sweating sickness and whose mourning ring he wears. He sees her in every woman he meets and likes, all of whom he assumes are repelled by his deformity. Shardlake’s first sidekick, Mark Poer, is twittish, something of a Lord Percy to his Blackadder, but represents both the son he’ll never have ...”

“... greater numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan, per capita, than recruits from any US state, according to Christian Science Monitor, which reported in 2010 that Micronesia had ‘lost soldiers at a rate five times the US average’.Photographs of ten of the dead hang on the wall of the arrivals lounge at Pohnpei Airport, where Kukulunn Galen, a representative from ...”

“... of public behaviour and the personalities of public people arise in great part from the ‘Judaeo-Christian attack against Roman standards of public glory’. In this opposition, to seek or confer fame is either an appropriate manifestation of public valour and dignity, or a self-violation and affront to our true inner worth; either civic virtue, due ...”

“... there. I recall it as a leafy, slow-paced and prosperous town of free-standing villas, largely Christian in population, served by a well-known Friends High School. Today it is the West Bank capital of the Palestinian Authority set up under Yasser Arafat as a direct result of the Israeli-PLO negotiations. Most of its ...”

“... have always been difficult to assimilate to the Modernist canon and who paint out of a traditional Christian conviction that art heals, but only as the expression of submission to Christ and faith in his Resurrection. He also adduces a whole range of commemorative practices that others simply ignore and which clearly have little if anything to do with ...”

“... this pot-pourri of Englishness was a clenched fist, blue like the European flag, tattooed with a ring of yellow European stars. The Brexiteers’ strategy was successful, and not only in winning the vote. (While the massive targeted drop of Facebook ads late in the campaign may have clinched victory for the Leave camp, the overall composition of the Leave ...”

“... writers vied for the attentions of a London public increasingly ambivalent about the Christian duty of giving. Lurid tales of advanced conmanship filled the papers: ‘Many beggars,’ Francis Grose reported, ‘extort charities by practising Faquir-like voluntary austerities and cruelties on themselves’; and, in London Labour and the London ...”

“... name does not sound particularly funny to Americans, but I know that it has a slightly outlandish ring to English ears. Years ago as a student in England I was friends with the group of comics who later formed Monty Python’s Flying Circus. One of the early episodes features a trial scene in which the judge reads a long list of names of the victims of a ...”

“... made no difference to the poet ‘qua poet’ writing a poem about Christ on the Cross whether the Christian account of that episode were true or not; but such a separation of powers doesn’t seem very likely to pertain anywhere in the real world, and elsewhere he was insistent enough on the importance of truth to the ...”

“... at all. I’d have quite liked something to march to, even (however inappropriately) ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, but the nearest we get is (to the tune of ‘Yellow Submarine’) ‘We all live in a terrorist regime,’ which isn’t a chant I feel entirely able to endorse. At Albemarle Street we split off and go and have lunch at ...”