“... are now drawing students from far and wide. He sets himself up against the reigning masters like William of Champeaux, a Platonist of whom Gordon Leff says that he resembled Lenin by confusing mental categories with real life. After a trip north to cause trouble in the school of Laon, Abelard comes back to Paris, perhaps under the auspices of King Louis’s ...”

“... in whose head an infinity of names and places are buzzing around: the 17th-century antiquarian was William Dugdale, not Thomas; the early Victorian author of The Mansions of England in the Olden Time was the artist Joseph Nash, not the architect John; the authority on Hadrian’s Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; ...”

“... on race, between an extraordinary openness to assimilation and outbursts of unashamed racism? William Nelson’s Enlightenment Biopolitics offers an elegant solution to the puzzle. French revolutionaries held such extreme views, he argues, because the French Enlightenment pioneered scientific racism a century before adepts of Darwin built racist ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... obediently transcribing the Calvinism of Alexander Nowell’s Catechism or First Instruction of Christian Religion. At the same time, however, they were given the means of escape to a different mental world: instead of being taught the medieval Latin that had prepared their pre-Reformation forbears to study Catholic theology, they were taught the classical ...”

“... equally. The growth of religious fanaticism in Israel must, I think, be connected to retrograde Christian passions in Lebanon, Islamic emotions in Egypt and elsewhere. I am not interested in determining which of the three religions is less tolerant, but it is a historical fact that Israel, founded in 1948, is the first quasi-theocratic state in the Middle ...”

“... of most Indian cities you still encounter the war graves of imperialism: the melancholy, unvisited Christian cemeteries which contain the serried ranks of monuments commemorating British subjects and their children buried there during the days of the Raj. Perhaps it is not surprising, or particularly shocking, that it was fear for European rather than Indian ...”

“... alive far from the academic world, in the reading of children and Science Fiction fans, and in Christian bookshops where I have seen whole areas of shelving bearing the legend ‘C.S. Lewis and Friends’. Similarly, Williams will be most revered in the journals of the Left, and some of his most ardent new readers will seek out his books in socialist and ...”

“... boyhood in China, where his father had business interests. His adored mother (an American, and a Christian Scientist) died when he was 11, and this event caused him a deep emotional disturbance, at the height of which he ran away from his much-detested public school. (The action, to his surprise, proved on the whole to have raised him in the world’s, and ...”

“... witches by sensations in your thumbs and other talents of that kind. It was, after all, the Christian faith, not Christian reason, that was enforced on Christendom for thirteen or so centuries. Even when he descends from the sweeping to the particular, Mr Harbison gets it ineffably wrong. The conception of a world ...”

“... if Charles Morgan is right, of hurling his boots at a housemaid who displeased him; and, if William Butler Yeats is right, of quarrelling violently with a sacked cook and a policeman over whether an omelette was fit to eat. Wary, one suspects, of being seen by the world as a moral crusader, or even an inadvertent do-gooder, Moore set about becoming a ...”

“... public schools and Oxbridge; patronised the arts and the London Season; and propounded traditional Christian values in highbrow journalism and popular fiction – even when they were racked by religious doubt. The ruling class ruled because it was clever, because it was well off, and because it hung together. It wore the old school tie, congregated in the Home ...”

“... in ‘Missouri Negro dialect’: he conducted interviews to try to get it right, and complained to William Dean Howells that he ‘had difficulty with this Negro talk because a Negro sometimes (rarely) says “goin’” and sometimes “gwyne” … and when you come to reproduce them on paper they look as if the variation resulted from the writer’s ...”

“... first book in 1901 (wrong), another who thinks it was 1894 (right). Marie Corelli’s The Master Christian is oddly transformed into The Masterful Christian (a feminist-Freudian slip?). The contents of books are sometimes botched, though whether through hurry, error, or delicacy is not clear. Gertrude Atherton’s Black ...”

“... Inn, Rugeley on the exhumed body of Walter Palmer five months after his murder by his brother William, the multiple poisoner. On the removal of the outer coffin a hole was bored in the leaden receptacle in which Walter Palmer’s body was confined, and instantly a most sickening and noxious effluvium escaped, which permeated the entire building, affected ...”