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“... a little girl whose parents had fought the Communists in Laos was resettled with her family in St Paul, Minnesota. They didn’t like it. St Paul seemed noisy and expensive, and they worried about crime. But the little girl watched Little House on the Prairie: she knew there was a Minnesota town called Walnut Grove where ...”

“... logically enough, that bishops should indeed reside in their dioceses. So what was the problem? It lay in the very fact of scrutinising what a bishop was – had the office of bishop been constituted by Christ, or by the church in its early development? If the latter, it implied that the authority of bishops came from the pope, successor of Peter, chosen by ...”

“... du Vêtement Masculin. His ‘accessible’ (i.e. readable) text is said by the publishers to lay before us ‘the entire fabric of the intellectual, spiritual and material forces of the modern age’, which is pitching it a bit strong. Certainly Chenoune has read his Chateaubriand and his Proust, his Scott Fitzgerald and his Ernest Hemingway, as well as ...”

“... traced a triad of conspiracies – of philosophes, Freemasons and Illuminati – which lay behind the assault on the Ancien Régime. English Masonry, however, unlike the noxious, anticlerical French model, was misguided rather than vicious. This distinction was confirmed by John Robison, professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh, in Proofs of a ...”

“... her with inferior status, begins here. According to naturalists, the origin of gender differences lay in men’s genitals and women’s menstrual cycle. That the testes produced masculinity was apparent from the effeminate nature of eunuchs; ingesting extracts of animal testes has long been assumed to enhance a man’s potency, bellicosity and intellectual ...”

“... dentist, medieval in technique, who drops the names of Sixties ephemerals Peter and Gordon. The lay-by killer who reels off a bill of Western stars and wears a black glove in homage to Shane. The Rochester police sergeant from In the Kingdom of Air who rattles through a checklist of French pop performers: Sylvie Vartan (‘a tarty-looking piece’), Johnnie ...”

“... the early paintings like the elegant, very deliberately stylised Swan Upping and St Francis lay the most bruising experiences of Spencer’s life. He went through World War One from 1915 onwards as a medical orderly, first of all in the Beaufort War Hospital, very recently converted from Bristol Lunatic Asylum, and later in Macedonia. The military side ...”

“... a vaunt. Paterson is an intellectually ambitious, uncompromising poet who owes a good deal to Paul Muldoon. Occasionally in this book you get a glimpse of Muldoon on the set of Men Behaving Badly (‘No one slips into the same woman twice’). Muldoon’s cometary allure has made him a danger for younger poets, as well as a demanding master. On the one ...”

“... Britain in 1951 knew what to celebrate. At the start of the opening ceremony – a service in St Paul’s – the King praised the nation’s courage in the world wars; the official handbook declared categorically that ‘Britain is a Christian Community’; brightly coloured pavilions on the South Bank paid tribute to picturesque countryside, seaside ...”

“... he set about imposing discipline on the Jesuits under his control. ‘He brought in conservative lay professors to replace teachers he considered too progressive,’ Paul Vallely writes in Pope Francis: Untying the Knots (2013). ‘He tried to make us more like a religious order,’ one of Bergoglio’s students ...”

“... on a courtesy visit to the USSR, as it then was, in 1988, a party which included Craig Raine, Paul Bailey and Timothy Mo. I don’t remember laughing more on any trip before or since; we were a very silly group, so much so that we often mystified our hosts and sometimes behaved disgracefully. Sue – and I even noticed this in the photo the Guardian used ...”

“... and to travel for it too!’ The motion was unanimously rejected and Vera returned to her room, ‘lay on the cold floor and wept with childish abandonment’. Brittain’s first year at Oxford hadn’t been much more satisfactory. She had believed that university would be an escape from provincial life. ‘Oxford I trust may lead to something,’ she had ...”

“... reneged on), the conditions for Daniel O’Connell’s creation of a popular political machine lay readily to hand. In 1828, as ‘the representative of the suffering of my country’, the Kerry gentleman-lawyer threatened the whole British parliamentary system by winning a by-election though technically unable to stand. Bew judges that by then he was ...”

“... facts have parted company but that opinion takes precedence. The first scene: I’m walking beside Paul Kagame, the current president of Rwanda and then a rebel leader, past low picket fences and small prefabricated houses in a residential suburb of Brussels. It’s cold and our breath mingles in the air as we speak. Kagame is swaddled in a thick coat. Even ...”

“... and is fond of dressing up in other people’s personalities. After the Almighty, after St Paul – for whom he confesses ‘a strange liking’ – his most influential model, or imaginative icon, is John Bunyan, whose life and work obsess him. Bunyan is ‘this dreamer and penman’, ‘the most prominent man of letters as far as English literature ...”