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“... sceptic might ask, what purpose can biography now serve? In the Classical world, and then in the Christian one, its function was exemplary. Biographers selected or heightened or invented material in order to create ‘patterns’ that would incite their readers to virtue and deter them from vice. That educational purpose warranted the transformation of life ...”

“... It has been said of the early Christian Irish that they were very interested in their history, but preferred it in the form of fiction. If one English reaction to his observation is likely to be that things have not changed much in the Emerald Isle, another ought to be that their own self-satisfaction is misplaced ...”

“... A mob of divided, disgruntled Democrats packed the Chicago Coliseum in July 1896 as William Jennings Bryan rose to the platform and delivered a roaring speech – still the speech for part of the American left – about an economic chimera. Bryan demanded that the United States peg its currency not to gold but to silver – the equivalent of treating cancer with grape seeds ...”

“... quite sensibly – got drunk. Many years ago, when I first read Eliot’s book The Idea of a Christian Society I thought it a bit absurd of him to write (this was in 1939) that we were faced with the choice between living in a Christian and a pagan society. But today I feel convinced that we are moving – if we are ...”

“... from drawing the obvious corollaries today – while, in the next best, the FBI’s Director, William Webster, gives a clear factual account of his organisation’s activities in this field. The rest of the book, which is edited and partly written by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Ambassador to the UN and the brother of the hero of ...”

“... Bare and Bald’, Coleridge enjoyed calling her in private, with more antipathy than inspiration. William McCarthy quotes the Table Talk anecdote early on in his compendious and admiring new biography of Barbauld, as though obliged to get it over with, and makes the suggestion that Barbauld had unwittingly revived Coleridge’s severe hang-ups about his ...”

“... Canal shares) and the transformer of English queens into empresses of India. Peel, reincarnated as William Gladstone, denounces him from beyond the grave. Gladstone sweeps to victory, Byron is toppled and Peel is avenged. Byron dies, leaving posterity perplexed. Had he been a writer who happened to become prime minister, or a prime minister who happened to be ...”

“... for the Darwinian challenges facing their party? For all their failings in the role of leader, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith did try at first to court the elusive middle ground in British politics; but the far from fanciful fear of electoral oblivion prompted a hurried succession of leaders, including Michael Howard, who was less temperamentally ...”

“... in the Oxford Union. The man who in old age was to be both revered and mocked as the People’s William started out with the firm conviction that ‘the majority will be in the wrong.’ And the startling steps by which he found himself among the Liberals were interpreted by many of his associates not as a journey of honest discovery but as timeserving in ...”

“... not to be able to be a normal person,’ Brando said in 1991, testifying in the trial of his son Christian for killing Dag Drollet, the lover who had been beating Christian’s half-sister Cheyenne. ‘I led a wasted life,’ Brando added, in tears. Some felt he was acting even in court. For as he always said, we all of us ...”

“... within Christianity – that is to say, the dispute as to whether to represent the heart of Christian theology by the Cross (as the iconoclasts argued) or by the face of Christ (as the iconophiles argued) – as itself decodable in terms of a struggle over how to represent the positions Christians were to adopt with respect not only to the Crucifixion ...”

“... that eventually led to current, commonly held tenets about the attentions fitting to a corpse. William Price, d.1893, was an arch druid in Wales, a surgeon, a Chartist, a vegetarian, a philoprogenetive advocate of free love, who called his child, born in his late years, Jesu Grist (sic). When the baby died, he tried to burn him on a pyre, according to ...”

“... ones so that the territory on the wrong side of the line would nonetheless be Spanish, and Christian. The thrust of these first inventors of an idea of the South Sea was towards hegemony and ownership, and it did not change greatly over the next 350 years. The rites of possession by empires were repeated over and over. Turning the sod, burying pennies ...”

“... a focus of pilgrimage. Anglo-Saxons venerated their last Saxon king, while the successors of William the Conqueror saw in the promotion of Edward’s cult within the coronation church a valuable mark of Norman legitimacy. On the Bayeux Tapestry the funeral procession of the holy king from the palace of Westminster to his resting-place in the Abbey ...”

“... form of religious dogma (although I do remember with some affection what it was like to do so).’ William Cowper wrote: ‘Blind unbelief is sure to err.’ But so is blind belief. Standing where he does, MacCulloch is aware of the importance of understanding his subject for those who are not religious: ‘The decay of actual religious practice in Europe ...”