“... have created – the great sufferer, great sinner, great gambler, sadist, masochist, child rapist, Christian, doyen of spite and zloi chelovek. Many of the more lurid images were due to the later Russian critics like Mikhailovsky and Merezhkovsky, and, even earlier, to Strakhov himself, who had known Dostoevsky well, and been his colleague on Vremya. This was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and thereafter in Italy. Carpenter, predictably, finds the three essayists – Richard Humphreys, John Alexander and Peter Robinson – ‘taking a rather solemn approach to the whole thing’; whereas, he assures us, Pound’s exertions on behalf of these arts partook ‘more than a little of the amiable joke’. Before it is through, Pound’s centenary ...”

“... had announced at least one further volume, Confessions of the Flesh, focusing primarily upon the Christian epoch.) Relating antiquity to modernity poses intriguing problems, because we are confronted simultaneously by great similarity and great difference. On the one hand, Foucault’s characterisation of Stoic sexual stylistics, with its valorisation of an ...”

“... When, in 1682, the Reverend Mr Busby, headmaster of Westminster School, expelled or suspended John Dryden’s son, the poet wrote him an excellent letter. Busby had already been at Westminster for more than forty years: he was that terrifying thing, a Great Headmaster. Moreover, Dryden had himself been among his pupils and knew well enough what tricks the old autocrat could get up to ...”

“... a permanent Venetian consulate had been established there, and 150 since the third English consul, John Eldred (who sailed to Aleppo on the Tiger, like the man the witch in Macbeth plans to kill), observed that it had been described so often it was hardly worth saying anything more about it. For Ralph Fitch, in 1594, Aleppo must have seemed one of the least ...”

“... is there so much evil in the world? One standard answer evolved by ancient Jewish visionaries and Christian church fathers is that God gave humans the freedom of moral choice. It is, of course, only a partial answer, since much evil is the result of natural forces, rather than human decisions. A second standard set of answers is now deployed: puny humans are ...”

“... is impossible to please God. Hence the designation of belief without evidence as one of the core Christian virtues. Later formulations could be more explicitly fideistic. That Christ was resurrected is certain, Tertullian claimed, because it is impossible. The Reformation principle of justification by faith alone raised the stakes: now faith was not only one ...”

“... such authority on the moral ambitions it represented. This branch-to-branch search is centred on John Stuart Mill, Henry Fawcett and Leslie Stephen. He then traces the change in style and tone which came as the academic profession and the public service spread their tentacles. He discusses three legal theorists who epitomised this transition – Henry ...”

“... Charny’s book offers an exploration and explanation of the values and proper manner of life for Christian knights and men at arms by someone who was a knight himself. The Master of Game is also a translation, but from the 15th not the 21st century. It is Edward, Duke of York’s English rendering of the most famous of the many hunting treatises of the ...”

“... Land dissolves in its last few lines, and of writing ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ rather than a Christian platitude like ‘the peace that passeth understanding’. It is the strangeness that counts, of the belief itself as much as of language, the insistence on something unrecognisable to set against the natural turpitude of the self. In his early years in ...”

“... district’ ceased to function towards the end of 1975, when it became the front line. Christian snipers took up positions on the upper floors of the hideous new Holiday Inn to sight and murder my neighbours. Palestinian commandos, the backbone of what was then an alliance of Sunni Muslim and leftist factions calling itself the Lebanese National ...”

“... on such matters), is one of the Parsifal problems; the issue of whether or not the work is ‘Christian’ is another. Nietzsche isolated these two problems together with a third, which is more peculiarly German: like Hanslick, Nietzsche detected and detested a conjoining of ‘religious’ and ‘nationalist-patriotic’ feeling, which he saw as a ...”

“... a thriving early 18th-century economy, in the form of a colony of heavily anthropomorphised bees. Christian and Stoic moralists recommended virtuous austerity, but Mandeville depicts its opposite, showing in his insect world ‘Millions endeavouring to supply/Each other’s lust and vanity’. But it transpires that this is far from a dystopia. Rather, vice ...”

“... Long ago, with his first collection, In a Green Night (1962), he stated his aims in the poem ‘As John to Patmos’, and again in ‘Islands’: O slave, soldier, worker under red trees sleeping, hear What I swear now, as John did: To praise lovelong, the living and the brown ...”