“... confessional has much to do with the fact that the priest is present as a representative of the Christian community rather than as an individual in his own right. This is why it doesn’t matter if he is even more sinful than you. Through this normalising apparatus, in Brooks’s view, the hapless confessee is reintegrated into the community and ...”

“... reaped a prodigious annual return. H.G. Wells said of one of John Jacob’s great-grandchildren, William Waldorf Astor, that he extracted rents ‘as effectively as a ferret draws blood from a rabbit’, though by Wells’s day spending rather than getting had become the most visible Astor occupation. With an exaggerated version of the anglophilia common to ...”

“... English Channel – Philip II’s failed Armada of 1588 – and ends a century later with another: William of Orange’s invasion flotilla, which brought about the ‘Glorious Revolution’. Both 1588 and 1688 were moments of intense insecurity and both were presaged by the spilling of Stuart blood: the shocking execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587 and ...”

“... through place comes and goes, but when it comes it often has a countercultural bent. The antiquary William Camden called it ‘a new kind of learning’ when he published his topographical history the Britannia in 1586, in a bid to remake local and historic connections severed by the Reformation. A Society of Antiquaries was duly formed, but it was abruptly ...”

“... Illuminati?’ A further scare followed the disappearance in 1826 of the anti-Masonic campaigner William Morgan. Soon, America had its own Anti-Masonic political party, which held the very first Presidential nominating convention, when, in November 1831, it selected William Wirt of Maryland. Wirt won only one state as a ...”

“... on a weekly sitcom called The Danny Thomas Show. Danny Thomas was the son of Maronite Christian immigrants from Kahlil Gibran’s village, Becharre, in north Lebanon. His assimilation was so thorough that he took the Al Jolson role of cantor’s son in a 1952 remake of The Jazz Singer. On the show, it fell to Uncle Tannous to expose the Lebanese ...”

“... on Swift’s memorial tablet, a tablet that notably does not contain any mention of the usual Christian consolations – any hope of salvation or another life beyond this one. It is strange because Swift had distanced the satirical writings from his own feelings: they were written in the voices of personae whose attitudes and beliefs had been chosen ...”

“... should also be recalled. The ballad is about a Jewish girl who attracts and then murders a Christian boy. ‘I haven’t let this young man off very lightly, have I?’ Joyce said to Budgen, and Stephen is at his worst here, but he recovers. Bloom remains silent for three pages, chiefly remembering things about his own daughter, no doubt with an air of ...”

“... At the end of his life, with his reputation already waning, William Dean Howells remarked that he would be remembered for the quantity of his writing, if not for its quality. He had published a hundred books: plays and poetry collections, memoirs and travel essays, novels and novellas. The plays are mostly undistinguished, the non-fiction writings good on the whole, the novels sharply divided between minor and major ...”

“... peoples, the intellectual value of the open air – but the very ideals of antiquity and the Christian tradition that Matthew Arnold had heard ebbing away from Dover Beach a long time before and that had now entirely dissipated. But people kept reading him, and not just in Scotland. None of the books is perfect, some aren’t good at all, and all are ...”

“... There​ is a long history of Europeans bringing buildings to California. A Christian mission has stood in some form or other at San Diego de Alcalá since 1769, testifying to the colonial expansion of the Spanish up the Pacific coast. Seventy miles further north, a few original elements of the sweeping church at San Juan Capistrano still stand, despite a massive earthquake in 1812 which destroyed much of the Baroque edifice ...”

“... it’, as well they might. Such stories might seem far away from modern science, but according to William Eamon they hold vital clues to the course and meaning of the Scientific Revolution. The quick-witted medical improviser was Leonardo Fioravanti, an eminent ‘professor of secrets’, one of a number of Renaissance writers who traded on their reputation ...”

“... should say ‘witted’ criticism. Should he continue in this direction, he will soon sound like William Empson, the Keeper of the Seven Seals in this area, a great critic posing as a terrible poet, who was apparently content to commit lines such as ‘Project her no projectiles, plan nor man it.’ It is bewildering that Hill, once so richly lyrical, should ...”

“... Kathy Acker, wild and woolly avatar of William Burroughs, is also one of the Blasted Allegorists, contemporary American artists whose self-important and talent-free doodles about Life, the Universe and Everything are hyped by Brian Wallis in his Introduction, a piece of writing conceivably worse than the pieces it introduces: For the writers in this book, these critical forms, such as interviews, monologues, jokes, dream narratives and parables, oppose the imposed narrative structure, the unquestioned hierarchy of characters, and the easy closure of much conventional – or even modernist – literature ...”

“... to our understanding of those tendencies than she thinks. It is from Calvin’s institutes of the Christian Religion that Manning derives what she calls the ‘puritan-provincial vision’, a world-view characterised by its embrace of contradictory absolutes: the innocence of faith and the torments of self-examination, acceptance of arbitrary predestination ...”