“... matter’. In Bynum’s account, relics of the saints bear witness to the central paradox of Christian materiality. If the changeless God could become incarnate in corruptible matter, then matter itself must be capable of the holy. Yet holy matter itself remained queasily subject to decay. Popular piety could even understand putrefaction as a negative ...”

“... it with phosphorus and calcium, to the detriment of rare alpine plants.A delicate issue. The John Muir Trust and the other owners of the land around Ben Nevis have constructed a ‘Memorial Site for Contemplation’ at the foot of the mountain, and are removing the memorials from the open hill. As for ashes, well, the Nevis Partnership says: try throwing ...”

“... in the Tasaday story and it was through them that much of the information was channelled. One was John Nance, an Associated Press combat photographer who had been wounded in Vietnam and recently posted to head AP’s Manila bureau. It was largely through Nance’s books, such as The Gentle Tasaday, together with National Geographic’s idyllic pictures ...”

“... over her own want of presence of mind’, and we sense the denial of feelings hidden from herself. John Wiltshire’s finely observed study of Jane Austen’s six completed novels is all about the way she conjures characters’ hidden feelings. His title might lead you to expect some revelation of Austen’s private passions but, while knowledgable about her ...”

“... desperate hours on Malta, describes the moment when the veteran grand master of the Knights of St John, Jean de La Valette, leapt into the gash the Turks had made in the bastion of Castile, after the other fort on the island, St Elmo, had already fallen.‘Come, my knights,’ he cried. ‘Let us all go and die there! This is the day!’ When his staff urged ...”

“... to have his author, as it were, after eating him. He had originally sneered at Wodehouse’s Christian names, Pelham and Grenville, and Wodehouse wrote to him as ‘Dear Walp’, suggesting that his initials stood for ‘Walpurgis Diarmid, or something of that sort’. The suggestion of establishment grandeur in his given names, which only a malicious ...”

“... methods, which the author acknowledges as springing from ‘a personal interpretation of a Christian faith’. In 1950 he was elected to Parliament and experienced a sudden immersion in the politics of intrigue. Within a year Benn was a proto-Bevanite, but by April 1954, he was acting as ‘producer, script reader, personal private secretary, PPS and ...”

“... consequence of reading this terminal record. He is not in the least uncharitable about the Christian books he devours, but he finds equally irrelevant the ‘atheists who wear dog-collars’, and the robust believers like C.S. Lewis who ‘domesticate the supernatural’. His own Christianity seems in some sense as necessary and logical for life ...”

“... different from her conjugal rights in the usual sense. She does not appear to have had any sort of Christian view of sexuality: her classical authors were quite enough for her. Some of them were Stoics, but her attitude to Abelard’s castration was not at all stoical. She was altogether a powerful and surprising person. Clanchy thinks she turned him into a ...”

“... stage-managed by Scott) – opposite the playbill for a production in 1823 of Shakespeare’s King John at the Theatre Royal, which boasted an ‘Attention to Costume never before equalled on the English Stage’. A playbill for a production of Shakespeare’s ‘King John’ in 1823. The century before Scott’s The ...”

“... go like this: it has produced few characters of depth or life (only Mr Biswas, Jean Brodie and John Self in almost forty years); it has been grossly, childishly explicit with symbol and allegory (Golding, Carter); the freedom of its characters has been too often muffled by bossy authorial intrusion (Spark, Drabble, Byatt); its comedy is too easy, too ...”

“... nebulous enemy from the other side of the world. It could be Bob Dylan performing his ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ (‘I discovered there was red stripes on the American flag’); but the year is 2002, and the song is ‘Talkin’ Al Kida Blues’ (‘Cuba’s our enemy, unless we need a prison camp’). Al Kida is the name of a man who lives ...”

“... those millions of words, enough is left of their character to dispose of his, beginning with the Christian rectitude so revered by Mrs Whitehouse and other latter-day moralists. It was humbug. Reith was a great one for church-going, publicly invoking God’s help and inviting everyone, from his sweethearts to ministers of state, to kneel with him and pray ...”

“... return. Later Christians gradually developed this idea into what became the standard two-stage Christian understanding of the afterlife. The original apocalyptic promises were never abandoned but indefinitely deferred. In the meantime, each person would face judgment at death. The saved went up to heaven in the sky. The old chthonic kingdoms of the dead ...”

“... cruel and unenlightened Catholic zealots. Thomas Eakins visited Spain in 1869, followed later by John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and others, bringing back visual and written descriptions of a country they thought both colourful and charming. The ‘Spanish craze’ reached epidemic proportions in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of ...”