“... eagerly adopted in London by the friends of Oswald Mosley – but by 1933 the local Catholic bishop, Bornewasser, was eating out of Hitler’s hand. He staged a public showing of the Holy Robe, one of the most famous relics in Catholic Europe, in the regime’s honour and so drew over four hundred thousand foreign visitors into Trier to admire the ...”

“... Times, for example – that he had been forbidden to teach by the authorities in Rome and by his bishop. Had this indeed been the case, the massive response of sympathetic protest and indignation would have been both intelligible and warranted. But what in fact took place was not a dramatic imposition of inquisitorial restraints on a scholar. Dr Küng ...”

“... dies. Journalists who worked for Beaverbrook speak of him with a combination of awe and affection. James Macmillan and John Ellison, who were so much of the Daily Express for so long, describe this slow, mocking North American voice coming over the phone with approbation or a grumble and always creating a frisson. Both have said to me, ‘You would have liked ...”

“... in the 1520s and 1530s. His New Testaments, printed on the Continent, were bought up by the Bishop of London, who had them burned in public. From the proceeds of their sale Tyndale and his co-workers simply printed more and smuggled them into the country in bales of cloth. What happened to the Lollards’ descendants when they made their way to London ...”

“... about many religious phenomena though he was, in The Varieties of Religious Experience William James tended to reduce the mystical experiences of medieval women, especially when accompanied by bodily rigidity, swelling or trances, to psychological aberrations. Catholic scholars such as Herbert Thurston also attempted to explain a number of supposed ...”

“... this particular rather pleasing little casket of flesh’ – and again with a poem by Elizabeth Bishop about a similar experience just before her seventh birthday. I suspect that many children have experienced with amazement the realisation that the self with which they are so familiar inhabits a particular public human being. The book is packed with ...”

“... as something that has the causal character of a thing; something that can undergo and do things. Bishop Berkeley’s characterisation of the self as a ‘thinking active principle’ seems as good as any. In this old use, a principle manages to sound like a thing without sounding like a table or a chair. The second claim, that the self is something ...”

“... a treatise in defence of the 1606 Oath of Allegiance imposed on English Catholics by James I, isn’t a scintillating work – ‘It would be swifter to eat it than to read it,’ Rundell jokes – but its significance for Donne can hardly be overstated. Biathanatos and Pseudo-Martyr form an unsettling diptych, a double meditation on the most ...”

“... scare, were, in fact, unable to produce any examples of heretical thought except an errant bishop in France. (William Forbes, who has been casually labelled Arminianist by some modern historians, seems to have been imbued with medieval Augustinianism.) ‘Arminian’ was a useful term of abuse and, along with accusations of incest and ...”

“... Last October James Rogan, a Republican congressman from California, and manager of the impeachment campaign against Clinton, faced the prospect of a tight re-election battle. His district had been targeted by the Democrats. Crucial to the outcome was the largest concentration of Armenian Americans in the US. To garner their 23,000 votes, Rogan – whose only-ever excursion outside the country was a trip to Armenia – proposed a non-binding Congressional resolution condemning the genocide of 1915 ...”

“... met the painter David, an Englishman who had befriended Charlotte Corday at her trial, and Charles James Fox – ‘rather lourd and maladroit’. With the help of a young American, Margaret and Katherine visited Tom Paine, ‘up half a dozen flights of stairs, in a remote part of the town’, and found him making models and playing with his two adopted ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... totally foreign to their day to day lives’. Venice-on-Thames. The royal parks, such as St James’s and Hyde Park, began opening to the public in the 17th century, while places like the Bear Gardens south of the river offered food and music, as well as bear-baiting, to more unruly customers. But the observant would have noticed something rather ...”

“... between Proust, Mann, Gide, Genet, Forster, Woolf, Stein, Langston Hughes, Djuna Barnes and Henry James, it may be more accurate to say that the modernist novel is a queer invention with a smattering of heterosexual imitators, many of them notably preoccupied with queer concerns. After the war, the mantle was passed from Vidal, Isherwood, Baldwin and Capote ...”

“... years of forewords, personal statements and reviews, none as explosive as her earlier essays on Bishop and Dickinson, on sexuality and motherhood. They are valuable mostly because they come from the author of those essays and of the poems. The language Rich uses to praise the late June Jordan is typical: ‘She believed, and nourished the belief, that ...”