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“... had reason to speak out. It would be going too far to say that 11 September undid centuries of Christian teaching and made revenge respectable again, just as William Harris is over the top when he opines: ‘In the United States, views about revenge seem to have sunk to a level appropriate to a neolithic village.’ But ...”

“... hell – where the fires would keep burning for as long as there were sinners for incineration. In William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), which unearths utopia in 21st-century Hammersmith, the Houses of Parliament have been repurposed as a store for dung, while in Utopia itself, Thomas More specifies that Utopians use gold, which is abundant, for chamber ...”

“... curios, the beached experiments, the gatherers of dust: the Latin translation of Paradise 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 ...”

“... uncovered an ancient discussion of male menstruation. The idea of male menstruation is part of the Christian tradition of seeing the Jew as inherently, biologically different. Thomas de Cantimpré, the 13th-century anatomist, calling on St Augustine as his authority, presented the first ‘scientific’ statement of this phenomenon. Male Jews, he ...”

“... within the closed circle of their fellow initiates, but they also followed F.D. Maurice, the Christian Socialist and an Apostle of an earlier generation, in thinking it wrong to unsettle other people by too much dwelling on one’s private misgivings. In the end, Sidgwick resigned his fellowship shortly before the repeal of the Test Act made the issue ...”

“... who conceive of history as theatrical spectacle. Years ago Hill, characterising the culture of Christian Nonconformists in the early 18th century, remarked contemptuously: ‘The cosmic battles which Milton and Bunyan depicted were succeeded by sterile controversies over deism and unitarianism.’ There unmistakably we encounter the historian as ...”

“... her martyr’s smile. The difference between them is seen in terms of gold: Aunt Thelma’s is ‘Christian gold, intangible as a halo’; Aunt Zita’s is solid and pagan. Inevitably she arouses resentment in the villagers, and the main part of the story, ‘North’, ends with a ritual burning before the family go south. This summary may make the book sound ...”

“... through the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment. The Scots cleric and enlightened historian William Robertson traced the operation in human history of a superintending providence working indirectly through natural secondary causes: ‘The Supreme Being conducteth all his operations by general laws.’ Robertson’s famous sermon, The Situation of the ...”

“... that views such as his have an eminent pedigree within the medical profession itself. The great William Hunter, doyen of the anatomy teachers of 18th-century London, delighted in offering his students a peculiarly chilling vision of the medic’s mentality. Surgeons, he told them, were eaten up with ‘emulation and contention’, operating in a ...”

“... in 1714, he tried to get an Act of Parliament passed declaring that Rome was a false Church. Under William III, Newton became first Warden and then Master of the Mint, offices which had hitherto been virtual sinecures. Newton turned them to important uses, including the establishment of the gold standard, which, Manuel wrily notes, ‘lasted just about as long ...”

“... and the violation of spaces activists claimed as sanctuary – resonates profoundly with Christian martyrdom, as well as a long tradition of symbolically charged political provocations and resistance.This tradition endures: in the US, seven states and more than three dozen cities now claim sanctuary status, refusing to cooperate with requests from ...”

“... to his official biography, it was his initial success in gathering followers that led jealous Christian rivals to denounce him to the new Communist authorities, leading to further imprisonment and torture in a ‘re-education’ camp. Moon was certainly interned for a year but Korean Christian researchers claim to have ...”

“... regarded as a pillar of modern British statehood just as significant as the Bill of Rights (which William and Mary had accepted before they replaced James II): the Act of Union of 1707. I seem to recall that in the summer of 1974 we went to the Lake District. Strangely, though, when I left home for university at the end of the decade, the English literature I ...”

“... Library as Additional MSS 60168-60256, thanks to the good offices of Noakes’s widow, Thompson, William Lamont and others. What to do with this equivalent, for the archaeology of sectarian nonconformity, of Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun? There followed from the appropriation of the Muggletonian archive a practical exploration of a ...”

“... examination. Among its officers and members were Tennyson, Gladstone, Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, William James, Henri Bergson, and scores of other persons with unimpeachable intellectual and social credentials. In the 18th century, the foundations of received Christian faith, undermined by deism, had been shored up for ...”