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“... Augustine agreed with older Christian tradition, classically expressed by a Greek Father such as John Chrysostom, that sexual continence was the essential ideal for all Christians: yet he arrived at this conclusion from very different premises. Pagels believes that Christians would do well to go back behind Augustine and to reaffirm that commitment to human ...”

“... she wouldn’t be at all disturbed or shocked. The fundamental part of his appeal, as the critic John Barber observed, ‘was both to mirror and to indulge the middle-class fear of sex’. Rattigan’s own father – their relations form another subtext in most of the plays – was a famous roué who had been eased out of the Foreign Office for ...”

“... and he opens with a marvellous one – surely his own discovery – by the Medieval chronicler John Lydgate, about a horse called Lyarde, too old now to work. They lead him to the smithy to pull off his shoon And put him to greenwood, there for to gone. The idea is echoed by Larkin, also well represented here, in his poem about race horses, ‘At ...”

“... than Emerson could reasonably have expected when she wrote it. Flying to Nowhere is announced as John Fuller’s ‘first work of adult fiction’. It rather comes at the reader from all directions. The author is best-known as an English poet, the narrative is set in Wales with a strong folkloric element, and its publication is subsidised by the Scottish ...”

“... which it represents is quite remarkable. If Jeffrey Archer embodies rebounding success, John Stonehouse’s book breathes failure. Stripped down, Ralph is the story of a successful politician who grows restless with his good life, gets into a terrible pickle, assumes a false identity, escapes and comes to a disastrous end. It’s not, one might ...”

“... I take first, however, a novel which this drawing fits in a more simple and literal way. John Kennedy Toole was dead some years when A Confederacy of Dunces appeared, having, so the Foreword records, killed himself in depression at his failure to get the book published. One cannot think him wrong to have despaired, when a book which should have ...”

“... be. ‘Literary work’ in copyright law is thus a semantic convenience of the same order as ‘John Doe’: what it is all depends. The legal fiction that the literary work has an abstract, single existence which accompanies but mysteriously transcends any book fits in nicely with the academic theory of ‘text’. It is no accident that the century which ...”

“... in the last decades of the 18th century, before Wilson came to be forgotten. The portrait painter John Hoppner, an early adherent of the Joey-Barton-on-Question-Time school of cultural criticism, declared that ‘considering the qualities of Claude & Wilson as He shd. the qualities of two fine Women, He should acknowledge the beauties of Claude but say Wilson ...”

“... Part Two, and to escape arrest he fled to France, accompanied by the Wykehamist gentleman-lawyer John Frost, described by Hitchens as secretary of the London Corresponding Society. The LCS was a society of radical artisans, not a gentleman’s club, and its secretary was in fact the shoemaker Thomas Hardy. The trial proceeded in Paine’s absence, and ...”

“... and pray to saints,’ implying that they could be seen as more Catholic than Protestant. Bishop John Aylmer was worried by the hard-won ‘capitulations’ that officially established Anglo-Ottoman trading relations, confessing that ‘surely in mine opinion it is very strange, and dangerous, that the desire of worldly and transitory things should carry men ...”

“... She said, affably, ‘Calm next Mahnday,’ Indicating that his pants would be ready by then, But nonetheless unwittingly invoking a mysterious occasion, Which, on ultimate reflection, appeared to be a sort Of centennial celebration for the author of Joseph and His Brothers And other works, even as it eventually turned out not to be. ‘Let’s have lunch on Tuesday,’ suggested Dubble-Barrell (he Pronounced it ‘Jewsday’, as if there had been inserted into the medieval calendar Another liturgical day, devoted to violent expressions of rage Against an unfortunate race, ungracious In its refusals of redemption, tiresome in its endless Ability to elicit persecution from the peoples of the West and elsewhere ...”

“... We met at the bar concealed behind a false front in the alley behind a curtain dyed purple and green down the stairs to the shuttered room baking in the Summer of Love, a country girl, dark glasses, twelve feet of cedar bar stacked with drinks but we already had those drinks, and it seems in the pool of liquid on the bar surface, after I finished pawing at her soft willing body, I could see the outline of a face ...”

“... It seems so long ago – tell me, did you bring your family to our marriage of convenience and regret? I remember your hearty cousins fresh from the Home Counties, so pleased with their good selves, ready to chance an arm, their knack with spoon and needle an astonishment. Didn’t you find time for a quick shot of something with the blokes? That one with a noticeable tic, that other nodding and leaning on a stick, their brave future shouted on the back of a toilet door? I admit the first funeral was a fright, like losing a finger in a kitchen appliance ...”

“... The Gods of Fairness The failure to see God is not a problem God has a problem with. Sure, he could see us if he had a hankering to do so, but that’s not the point. The point is his concern for us and for biscuits. For the loaf of bread that turns in the night sky over Stockholm. Not there, over there. And I yelled them what I had told them before ...”

“...                               Still they stood, A great wave from it going over them, As if the earth in one unlooked-for favour Had made them certain earth returned their love. Robert Frost If anything is safe to love, it is the jellyfish, Aurelia aurita, that pink and silver moon-cloud, drifting wild in every harbour from the South Atlantic to the Bay of Reykjavik; or Hippocampus, monstrous to the Greeks, though shaped like horses, gentle as the wind in August, moving softly through the weeds, the brood male gathering the eggs into his pouch like treasure, while the female swims away to miles of seagrass; coral; predators ...”