“... field that closes at night’. Some time in the evening of 28 September 1978 Albino Luciani, Pope John Paul I, abandoned his tenure of the throne of St Peter. He had been Pope for only 33 days. The news was entirely unexpected. Unlike his predecessor, John Paul had shown no signs of ill-health during his brief reign, and ...”

“... They take a therapeutic – even psychoanalytic – approach to ‘cannibalistic cravings’. Christian teaching in the region has left the Yagwoia surrounded by witch-hunting neighbours, but womba, the local vernacular for ‘witchcraft’, is not – yet – outlawed. Qang, a Yagwoia man in his twenties, had repeated dreams of pigs being ...”

“... which have appeared. Susan Brigden’s over-arching theme is of a world of shared faith broken, a Christian community irreparably divided. This was how the London annalist John Stow, who lived through the entire process, understood it, with much nostalgic mourning for all those seasonal rituals and festivals and the social ...”

“... Modern world had to be placed in a framework which fitted uneasily with an optimistic outlook. Christian refusal to believe that man was in principle perfectible in his mortal state joined with a pessimistically cyclical view of history to inhibit faith in human progress. Readers who have had to absorb the findings of the modern school of civic humanists ...”

“... admiration of patriots in the American colonies. She corresponded with Abigail Adams, the wife of John Adams, and with Mercy Otis Warren, later herself to become a historian of the American Revolution. In 1784-85 she visited America, meeting George Washington. The next year she visited France, and her final publication, which came out in 1791, was a pamphlet ...”

“... The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) leader, John O’Leary who, in Yeats’s poem, shared his grave with the corpse of ‘romantic Ireland’, observing that the Brotherhood’s ‘propagandist work was … entirely separatist with practically no reference to Republicanism’. Similarly, and just as ...”

“... More particularly, he was the disciple who questioned the truth of Jesus’s resurrection. In John 20, the only gospel source for the story, he demands to see and touch the physical evidence of crucifixion – ‘Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will ...”

“... In 1978 Terry Eagleton wrote an essay on John Bayley in the New Left Review. It is a ritual excoriation of that most tactful of ‘liberal humanist’ critics, punctuated with predictable sneers about ‘a view of life from the Oxford senior common room window’ and how Bayley’s criticism prizes a liberal disorder that depends on a conservative order ‘within which the gentleman may wear his art and opinions lightly ...”

“... on the site of the ancient polis of Byzantion. Notwithstanding later legend, this was not a Christian capital. It was an imperial residence, a Roman city under the patronage of Apollo, the sun and the emperor himself. By the time Christian monuments began to proliferate, the victorious Constantine and still more his ...”

“... was light. And God said “Er – could I just see the darkness again?”’ If this is not Pope John Paul II’s kind of God, it’s as much because of the hesitancy as the gender. If he were ever in two minds on a subject, both of them would be infallible. Not for nothing was the priest who taught him theology in Rome known as ‘The Rigid’. As a Polish ...”

“... by the 1850s, when William Russell was reporting from the Crimea for the Times and his editor, John Delane, was fulminating against the mismanagement of the war, nobody could argue with it. ‘This country is ruled by the Times,’ the Saturday Review declared. ‘We all know it, or if we do not know it, we ought to know it.’ Once, governments had ...”

“... to Nobby’s and drink nickel draft beers. As a flaneur at the café he ‘read everyone, from John Fante to Aldous Huxley to Lao-tzu. My favourite novel at the time was Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, about a down-and-out barfly – a bleak omen, in retrospect, of where my life would one day land.’ (The epigraph of Beautiful Things is a few lines from ...”

“... Acelebrated 17th-century​ poet composes, over many years, his own eccentric version of Christian theology. Along the way he becomes blind, and so dictates the work to scribes, with additions, revisions and recopyings as it proceeds. Before he can publish his treatise the political winds shift, and it is not printed in his lifetime ...”

“... her official biographer, have been at fault here. While spending a lot of time with Plato and Christian Platonism, as of course they should, they have allowed Kant to languish in the dusty rear.Wilson takes us back to Iris’s undergraduate tutorials with Donald MacKinnon. There was a lot of Kant on the table. What sort of Kant I wish I knew. These ...”

“... England (S.T. Bindoff, 1950), England Under the Tudors (G.R. Elton, 1955), Tudor England again (John Guy, 1988), branding the age – see J.A. Williamson’s The Tudor Age (1953) – with the logo of the double rose of the dynasty which, conveniently, coincided with a generous 16th century of 118 years, 1485 to 1603. It is a good question how we would have ...”