“... 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 ...”

“... that, thanks to his contacts with French Jesuits, he was ‘one of the last heirs to the Christian Platonism of the Renaissance, which flowered so brilliantly in France in the 16th century’. The basis for this conclusion is unclear, and the available evidence can also be used to support the alternative interpretation (favoured by Thuillier) that ...”

“... mouths.)The city of memory is defined by its fugitive bibliography (‘a complete set of Petra Christian ... the likes of Abe Merit, Clark Ashton Smith, C.L. Moore, Sax Rohmer, H. Warner Munn and William Hope Hodgson ... an Australian edition of Beyond the Barrier of space by Pel Torro’) or by the brands of whisky it takes to energise the drifter, the ...”

“... prepared to subscribe, such as the Kantian idea of treating people as ends in themselves or the Christian idea of the equal worth of all human beings before God – even if these contradict many more concrete beliefs. On the basis of the latter, for example, he claims that it was simply a mistake, resting on poor inference or distortion of the ...”

“... fame and industrial leadership. All of these claimed achievements have something of a hollow ring when examined more critically. Collectively, too, the later Wedgwoods have been portrayed, along with the Darwins, as members of the ‘Intellectual Aristocracy’: one of those families who gained positions of great power and influence in English academic ...”

“... mature people ‘accepted society as it was and didn’t seek to alter it’ (in a spirit of Christian or Eliot-like resignation); mature judgment was ‘objective’ or ‘impersonal’ – that is, uncompromised by passion or ideology. Which put the young of the Fifties at a disadvantage, especially as they were so small a generation. ‘There were so ...”

“... a flautist himself – at one time with the London Philharmonic. The composers Alan Rawsthorne, Christian Darnton, John Sykes were among his closest friends, and when he wrote with or for them, collaboration could be profound. At times, however, he almost churned out political campaign material which its organisers would then deal out to whatever composers ...”

“... the averagely hopeful traveller will be looking for: the everlastingly incomprehensible has the ring of a turn-off, not of an attraction. Segalen may have here had in mind only the initial shock of the exotic, however: that first sense of alienation for which the French have just the right word, dépaysement. For all his medical education, once he began to ...”

“... lullabies. As you would expect, the voice is tuneful and there is often an intelligent, estranged ring to what he writes. His book hovers over the hills and waterways of Scotland, staring down at the rutted marks of former glaciers and the footprints of deer, but all the while there are questions whispered under his breath: do I belong here? Is Scotland ...”

“... of Mehmet the Conqueror, who overthrew Byzantium but set up Greek and Armenian patriarchates, with Christian behaviour in Spain: ‘You drove out the Muslims, who had made their homes there, into the sea by the thousands and burned them at the stake.’ Back in the shadow of Musa Dagh, Gabriel discovers a secret cache of rifles in the graveyard and works out a ...”

“... not so good. Many of the nature/nurture arguments seem also to recapitulate the scholastic Christian and Muslim problem of determinism/freedom. Cognition v. culture is where we have got to after debates in the West spanning millennia. Benjamin Lee Whorf gave Sapir’s ideas their most radical twist. He was employed all his life by an insurance company ...”

“... down with the cones of our retinas. I looked up ‘darkness’ on the Web – and was offered Christian ministries offering to lead me to salvation. And there is always death. We say death is darkness, and darkness death. In Aberdeen, although it was not yet five o’clock, the harbour lights were lit against the night sky. Ships were berthed right up ...”

“... to become a better place. In this self-critical mode, a historical contrast is often drawn. Christian Europe was for centuries disfigured by savage religious intolerance, by every kind of persecution, inquisition, expulsion, pogrom resorted to in the attempt to stamp out other communities of faith, Jewish or Muslim, not to speak of heretics within the ...”