“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... religious (announced by endorsements on the cover from the archbishop of York and the born-again Christian MP Tim Farron); his PhD, the thesis of which informs his book, was in church history. His subtitle claims that puritans invented freedom, which might seem extravagant to anyone who associates puritanism with its negation.Puritans aimed high, and they ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... William Ansah Sessarakoo’s​ father, John Corrantee of Annamaboe, on the Gold Coast, was a member of the Fante ruling family and a prominent merchant, well known in the interior and among European slave traders. In order to strengthen ties with his European business partners, and to give his heirs an advantage over their countrymen, Corrantee sent one of his sons to be educated in France and another – Sessarakoo – in England ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... even ‘tolerant’. There is some evidence for this, not only in sagas but also in contemporary Christian sources, although ‘cynical’ would perhaps be a better word for the reported attitude of some Vikings to Christianity (it was still alive in the great-great-great-great-grandson of the founder of Normandy, ...”

“... Reagan’s personally approved ‘hero’. There was Oliver North the Man of God, the born-again Christian from the charismatic Episcopal Church of the Apostles who believed that the Lord had healed his wounds and who – in the words of one former associate at the National Security Council – ‘thought he was doing God’s work at the NSC.’ There was ...”

“... to French rule only in 1912. Morocco’s proximity to Western Europe once struck fear into Christian hearts; today its closeness makes it a prime destination for Westerners seeking easy exotica. This transition from Oriental power to Orientalist fantasy – and all the misrepresentations, stereotypes and appropriations it involves – undergirds the ...”

“... revolutionary conceptions in human history, which Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self claims as Christian in inspiration. The modern equivalent of Moll Flanders in this respect is EastEnders. Auerbach’s Mimesis, one of the great works of literary scholarship, was written between 1942 and 1945 in Istanbul, where Auerbach, a Berlin Jew, had taken refuge ...”

“... to fall back on. There is a tradition of incurious condescension. It is caught by the underrated William McFee, in a novel of 1928, Pilgrims of Adversity, where he describes the alcaldia or town hall of Havana: A number of officials sat at desks in this large chamber, leaning back in their chairs, bending over documents, reaching for telephones and ...”

“... Room and the Patient, a 1906 book which includes a reference to ‘anaesthetic tables’), William James, James Thomson, William Acton, Charles-Louis Philippe, W.R. Burnett (a crime novelist in whose High Sierra – published in 1940 – the phrase ‘She was … a one-night-stand type’ occurs), Edward Winslow ...”

“... and your sister.’ Stuck in this enforced, accompanied solitude, Wordsworth turned to writing. ‘William works hard,’ Dorothy reported, ‘but not very much in German.’ He worked with the utter absorption that would always mark his greatest periods of self-discovery, and not for the first time Dorothy worried that the strain of making verses was making ...”