“... 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 ...”

“... of the Apocalypse reappear in the angel’s dialectical relationship with the storm. But unlike John the Revelator, who was told to ‘seal up those things which the thunders uttered and write them not’, Benjamin wrote down what the thunders said, for in the violence of the storm he seems to have heard the still small voice of Kant, arguing for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is never given – but it’s not hard to supply: J.G. Ballard, incidentally, never uses his Christian name authorially.) We are clearly invited to locate the traumatic source of Ballard’s creativity in an awful primal experience, here relived under artistic discipline. Jim is first discovered as one of the privileged foreign trading community, living ...”

“... successive frames could be run back and forth, at any speed, by the eternal, omniscient god of Christian theology. Fortunately, life is not like that. Our deepest experience is of the reality of irreversibility: ‘The rose that once has blown forever dies.’ Running a film backwards produces farcical fantasy, not an acceptable, alternative tale. How can ...”

“... it as ‘vomit’. Nevertheless, helped by a determined defence from its British publisher, John Calder (who claimed to discern in Burroughs the James Joyce of our day), Naked Lunch went on to become a terrific post-Chatterley best-seller. The Place of Dead Roads is published with a grant from the Arts Council: a double seal of Establishment approval ...”

“... pubs where ‘no one’ wants to be distracted from drinking ‘by music or women’. We have John Boyd Orr describing how he propelled selected children – male, of course – from a poor school into scholarships: his achievement leads him to comment on the ‘many potential first-class leaders and scientists’ lost to the country in ‘the poorer ...”

“... public and (most important) private life as something which leaves Francis of Assisi looking like John Aspinall. And, lest theologians rush to their nibs to remind me that there are no Quaker saints, let me quote one of those crystalline and unequivocal phrases that all who have read the martyr’s own tapes have imperishably committed to memory: ‘Look, I ...”

“... On 15 July 1099, a Christian army perhaps 14,000 strong captured Jerusalem after a five-week siege and three years’ campaigning. A contemporary witness reported slaughter on such a scale that ‘crusaders rode in blood to the knees and bridles of their horses.’ Christopher Tyerman quotes this twice, in full and slightly abbreviated forms, noting that the chronicler was inspired by Revelation 14 ...”

“... system’ would look after us all. I think the reality shook him. It was almost as if a staunch Christian, who had always lived and acted in a respectful Christian way, were suddenly being made to question God. The Lawrences’ ostensible aim is to expose the hypocrisies of the system, their argument being that if ...”

“... legal text of considerable historical importance) was lifted from the work of Elisha Qimron and John Strugnell: ‘It must be a miracle that [the Eisenman-Wise] edition made all the same joins and transitions between fragmentary manuscripts that Strugnell and Qimron made.’ Even allowing for more coincidences and grey areas of textual reconstruction than ...”

“... by the Bishop of Ely, and got to know F.D. Maurice, Professor of Moral Philosophy and proponent of Christian Socialism. Carpenter was also friendly with Henry Fawcett and the mathematician W.K. Clifford (not R.K., as Tsuzuki has it); he also began reading Walt Whitman. After journeying to Italy, and experiencing with Whitman’s verse a whole array of new ...”

“... Work by 18 of the photographers with whom John Pilger has collaborated over the last thirty or forty years is on show in Reporting the World, at the Barbican Gallery until 30 September. The exhibition is a record of events we remember – vaguely or clearly – having followed and others that we didn’t follow, even if we tell ourselves now that we did ...”

“... seen anything like the David, but his imagination would have been full of such figures. Medieval Christian artists depicted the naked statues of pagan antiquity in elaborate temples or great fora, presiding over populations, demanding veneration, vomiting devils or revealing themselves to be devils. They grimace, they bend over, sometimes they break apart ...”