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“... College, Oxford had instilled a churchy disdain for low commercialism. Though he quickly tired of Christian ‘mumbo-jumbo’, he was a lifelong lover of churches. Hanson includes a letter from an early trip to northern France, which shows him already coming to understand Gothic cathedrals not as built expressions of doctrine but as outcrops of a landscape ...”

“... the gold coinage of the European humanistic tradition; the magnificent florins of humanism will ring once again, not against the archaeologist’s spade, but ... like the jingling coins of common currency passing from hand to hand. It may only be a chance of translation that the coin of Mandelstam’s hope is the Florentine one, the currency of Dante’s ...”

“... of the fatedness to irony, but then, as Cavell says, ‘Wittgenstein’s audience is not the Christian inoculated against Christianity.’ Cavell writes not primarily to produce new theses or conclusions, nor to produce new arguments to old conclusions, but, as Kierkegaard and the later Wittgenstein did, to excavate and transform the reader’s ...”

“... invented – the Four O’Clock in the Morning Club, whose insomniac members were entitled to ring each other up at that lonely hour. These healing conversations might largely consist of warnings about an imminent New Moon, for they shared a fanatic belief in the danger of glimpsing such a phenomenon through intervening glass. (Spectacles, and on occasion ...”

“... but just as the Sufis challenged Sharia Islam, Vaishnavites the Vedic ritualists, or Christian mystics the authority of the pope, this move threatens the guardians and interpreters of scripture. In Ge’s account, Zhu Xi is a cantankerous, embattled figure, far from the plaster saint he later became, vigorously defending engagement with the world ...”

“... Mr Lagnari knew that he was dying. His wife and son opened the door before I had a chance to ring the bell. They made way for me in the tiny vestibule, their faces pinched with worry. ‘He’s more settled now,’ the son whispered, anxious that his father might overhear, ‘but he thinks his number’s up.’ I nodded: his impressions might be more ...”

“... of the playing fields at Kingswood, Frank and his comrades imbibed the lessons of pagan epic and Christian piety to synthesise their Communism. The two brothers reached similar conclusions about the efforts that the privileged few would be called on to make in the name of the proletariat. What could be more chivalrous or public spirited? Yet Frank was keener ...”

“... regularly depicted him striding into battle, walking a tightrope or slugging it out in the boxing ring. The image was one of perpetual motion, yet he could not move unaided: FDR was the wheelchair president. It’s important to spell out what his disability entailed. Roosevelt was stricken by polio in 1921 and never recovered the use of his legs. Every day he ...”

“... eating ice cream; a body bearing the scrawled sign ‘This nigger tried to vote’; or the wedding ring worn by a black woman who hangs from a tree in front of a great crowd while horses graze in the background. In a 1909 article called ‘Lynching, Our National Crime’, Ida B. Wells identified another, unassimilable strangeness: ‘No other nation, civilised ...”

“... Afterwards, and for no obvious reason, he began calling friends on his mobile phone. ‘I’d just ring and say, “Hi, how are you?” – that kind of thing,’ he told me. ‘It wasn’t that I had much to say. I don’t know why, but I was starting to feel very lonely.’ His wife had already left the house when he woke the next morning. Ono had no ...”

“... paranoia, Israel’s war in Lebanon went from bad to worse. The massacre perpetrated by Israel’s Christian Lebanese allies in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila in August 1982 dramatically stepped up both domestic and foreign opposition to the war. Begin’s response was to turn his back on his foreign critics. He appealed to the Cabinet to ...”

“... from ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of less ordered pages, ‘hard drives, file folders, three-ring binders, spiral-bound notebooks and floppy disks’. Success came to Wallace early, with his first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), written while he was an English and philosophy undergraduate at Amherst. The 70-page thesis written concurrently for the ...”

“... God in the real pantheism of this people-I.Fernando Pessoa, The Book of DisquietIt is the first or Christian name that counts, that is what makes one be as they are.Gertrude Stein, writing about Ulysses S. GrantIn autumn​ 1981, hot new act Prince was offered two nights at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum supporting the Rolling Stones. His first impulse was ...”

“... balanced budgets, at competitive levels of taxation. The historic commitments of both social and Christian democracy to full employment and traditional welfare services, already scaled down or cut back, would cease to have any further institutional purchase. This is a revolutionary prospect. The single obligation of the projected European Central Bank, more ...”

“... from the gloom of the transit corridor into the designer dusk of Sheremetievo airport and the ring-mail burnished rust of the ceiling’s empty pilchard tins. Vladimir Stabnikov is waiting for us. I have met him before, in England and in the Soviet Union. Small, thick-set, black-eyed, densely-bearded, restlessly rubbing his hands, inexplicably ...”