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“... like Thomas More, it was Luther who was Muhammad, in his iconoclasm and his lust, a priest who took a wife and bid Protestant clergymen to do the same. Or it was Calvin: a Catholic almanac depicted Satan with one claw on the turbaned prophet’s shoulder, the other sunk into the pastor’s. The Christians’ version of Muhammad was violent and ...”

“... Gesina; Rembrandt had Saskia and Hendrickje; and at least one prominent Vermeer scholar, John Michael Montias, has speculated that several of the unknown women in Vermeer’s paintings are the artist’s wife or daughter. Perhaps the order of things was a bit more bourgeois in 17th-century Holland: though biographical data for the Dutch are ...”

“... importance of the media managers. When the Northern Ireland negotiations got serious Tony Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during ...”

“... for Equatorial Guinea, including ‘a shell company owned by Obiang in the Bahamas, whose account took deposits in suitcases of cash in plastic-wrapped bundles’. Staff at the bank hadn’t bothered to read the 2001 IMF reports that detailed missing revenues in their client’s country or to comply with money-laundering laws by establishing the origins of ...”

“... support for the divorce. But Pole delayed showing his hand in any public way, and early in 1532 took himself out of the national debate and returned to Italy. This was the beginning of 23 years of exile, during which time a high-powered ecclesiastical career almost propelled him to the papacy. But in the mid-1530s his situation was delicately poised. Henry ...”

“... maintaining that it’s all in good fun and shouldn’t be taken (too) seriously’. According to John Lindow’s ‘unnatural history’ of trolls, the original trolls of Scandinavian folklore punished improper behaviour and upheld social norms. If you take the behavioural code of lulz seriously and erase any commitment to social norms, what you are left ...”

“... Mary Patterson, married Lewis Sheridan Leary in 1858. The following year, Leary was recruited by John Brown for his suicidal raid on Harpers Ferry, and the bullet-riddled shawl that was eventually returned to Mary was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next ...”

“... mi,á clàbar criadha tiugh:Air carraig chòmhnaird chuir mo chos;mo cheuman shocruich e.He took me from a fearful pit,And from the miry clay,And on a rock He set my feet,Establishing my way.Late one evening last summer, I crossed the moor alone, picking my way between the pools and the peat hags. It’s not easy land. It just takes one bad step – a ...”

“... the new US ambassador to the Vatican had been ratified by the Senate. He could easily, if the mood took him, find a willing camera somewhere in front of St Peter’s and call on the Church to keep its nose out of American politics, to concentrate instead on cleaning up its own doctrinal house. It wasn’t hard to imagine Vance, in that week, as Trump’s ...”

“... a name for herself and earn money. Her literary career began with a huge stroke of luck when she took over from Cyril Hare as Faber & Faber’s leading crime writer at just the right moment. Cover Her Face, her first detective novel, was published in 1962. James retained her prominence for more than half a century, and Faber has now reprinted some of her ...”

“... justice issue and governed by the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, such centres are controversial. It took ten years to get this one off the ground. But there are some two hundred SDCFs in other countries, including Canada, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands and Australia. Different countries have different models: standalone facilities, hospital-based ...”

“... John Major has now been prime minister for four years. For us, as presumably for him, it often seems a lifetime, so crowded has his premiership been with crises of one sort or another. Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon not unreasonably, therefore, think this the moment to assess his prime ministerial career; the result is The Major Effect, a collection of 26 essays by a distinguished group of commentators – including the editors ...”

“... that flourished in Manhattan in the first third of the 20th century. Celebrity caricature took off from and fostered a shared world of famous people affectionately known by their public personas. That club was not one that Groucho Marx refused to join. On the contrary, it supplied the ground for his retort, after Jack Warner threatened a copyright ...”

“... Two voices are there of Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University John Halperin, whose rank and area of operation are, by what strikes me as a publishing solecism in a book that solicits a general readership, placed in apposition to his name on the title-page. The first voice is scarcely of the deep, but it utters some common sense ...”

“... this prosopographical approach to sanctity has become more and more popular. The American scholar John Mecklin studied the saint as a ‘culture type’ in 1941. In his book Altruistic Love (1951), the Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin refined Coulton’s analysis by investigating the social origins of some three thousand saints. He concluded that ‘the ...”