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“... historical question. Sometimes, however, there are simple explanations for complex events, and John Gray has one to offer: ‘Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion.’ This might appear a sweeping generalisation, but, for Gray, seemingly diverse historical phenomena are manifestations of a single, heavily disguised and hydra-headed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... own or full political rights. A third justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially during the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could feel safe only in a Jewish homeland, many people now believe that Israel deserves special treatment from the United States. The country’s creation was ...”

“... another party if it is to be more than assent. It happens within the heart (according to King John) but becomes consent only when it is declared. The word could mean, as now, agreement to a proposal, but Shakespeare’s plays reflect social conditions in which consent between lovers depends on the consent given by friends and family. As Petruchio tells ...”

“... Lost by William Hogg, the versions of Spenser’s Shepeardes Calender by Theodore Bathurst and John Dove (both of which experiment vigorously with Latin metrical form), the stately Latin transformation of Absalom and Achitophel by Francis Atterbury. David Money’s learned book seeks to rescue one exponent of this cliqueish art-form from the dust-heap. His ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and revered Newman, who had, as Martin reminds us, intenser emotions about other men, Ambrose St John in particular, ‘than are usually considered normal’. Martin also gives an enchanting quote from Newman’s novel Loss and Gain, which somehow encapsulates the whole curious and colourful world of Victorian Oxford’s High Church friendships and ...”