“... charismatic, amoral outsider at the centre. The story got him the attention of the publisher John Farrar, who passed it to Edward Weeks at the Atlantic. Matthiessen was taken on as a client by ‘the toughest agent in town’. Bernice Baumgarten also represented John Dos Passos, Edna St Vincent Millay and Raymond ...”

“... the head inspires discussions of mental illness, hairstyles, beheading, and the rival relics of John the Baptist’s head. Under the rubric of skin, Hartnell ad-dresses flaying, leprosy, plastic surgery, racial difference and manuscripts – for, as others have pointed out, most of what we know about the premodern past is written on the skins of dead ...”

“... John Robert Seeley was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge between Kingsley and Acton. One of the few eminent Victorians who inspired no memorial biography, he was best remembered as the author of The Expansion of England (1883), a sweeping historical manifesto in favour of the unification of the British Empire ...”

“... may be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon it. The wrong idea is the ‘widely held belief that the ancient pre-...”

“... names do not appear very prominently in the Jesuit sources, but the same is not true of the ‘Christian’ names converts received at baptism, like Candida Xu, the grande dame of Shanghai converts, who supported the mission lavishly and paid for the decoration of churches as far away as Mechelen. However, the giving not just of ...”

“... at once, the impression isn’t mistaken, for Dante himself undergoes an intense viva on the Christian virtues by Saints Peter, James and John. Beatrice begins one typical lesson by saying ‘secondo mio infallibile avviso’ (‘in my infallible opinion’) but her teaching is not only administered with smiles: she ...”

“... hunt reflects the clerical grief and disapproval that would lead to the founding of the Christian orders of knights, the Templars and the Hospitallers, in an effort to discipline the Crusades and their Christian militia. ‘We cannot define any better the ideological function that the Church assigned to ...”

“... of mise en scène and all-round plausibility, The Emperor of Ocean Park lies somewhere south of John Grisham and north of Nancy Drew. It is long-winded, shoddily put together and riddled with repetitions and small inconsistencies: characters are introduced twice, facts stated and restated as if for the first time; a pool table appears mid-scene (as if from ...”

“... communities and the imperial tax system, they could use their newly unencumbered wealth to support Christian causes. Paulinus’ steady income ensured that his monastic brotherhood at Nola could continue to follow a simple life of prayer, fasting, vigil and scriptural study. He also funded the construction of a magnificent new church complex that, in its ...”

“... new ideas to people like Menocchio. An Italian translation of the 14th-century Travels of Sir John Mandeville revealed to him the existence of the quite different civilisations and religions of Islam, India and China. He also probably read the Koran, of which an Italian translation appeared in Venice in 1547. This is another example of the republic’s ...”

“... with ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ (Phillips Brooks) and ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ (John Greenleaf Whittier) as runners-up. Among the works of the canonical English poets, the lines known to most people are probably those beginning Blake’s Milton, ‘And did those feet in ancient time ...’, which Parry set to music and turned into the hymn ...”

“... Americans and to the Asians, whose theologians have not yet confronted the untenability of the Christian religion, and whose uneducated populations are more easily persuaded to multiply the ranks of the Papal battalions. These are big ambitions, but Karol Wojtyla is a big man. Once one recognises what he is up to, all the paradoxes of his character fall ...”

“... might well think, but, for the Manuels, they were all intent on specifying the nature of an ideal Christian society. Even if that be granted – and the dominant ideals of the Renaissance city-planners were surely pagan rather than Christian – the question still remains whether, More apart, they fall into the category of ...”

“... profess allegiance; as Lilla notes, however, Vico’s argument was squarely within the alternative Christian tradition of Eusebius, who had equated the pax Romana with the pax Christi as works of Providence. It is a feature of Lilla’s interpretation that from an early stage Vico preferred the lessons of Rome to those of Greece. When he comes to the substance ...”

“... Lord of the Rings country and yet, interestingly, social nuances appear even in this consciously Christian and nostalgic setting. Tolkien the Catholic could not stand Lewis’s fundamentalist allegory, as exemplified in tales like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and thought them badly and vulgarly written. Lewis, who wrote with astonishing speed, was ...”