“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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, ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are the most often felt; their centrality may lie in the strength of our desire to avoid them. William Miller’s suggestion has a creeping plausibility – in the playground, among teenagers, among mid-life colleagues, in the retirement home. It has a serious claim to express a human universal, valid for all societies, with origins in the deep past of the ...”

“... gentiles’ could also be spun into a reason why the faithful should attend to them. As William Baldwin put it in the upbeat English version of Diogenes which he published in 1547 under the title A Treatise of Morall Philosophye, contayning the Sayinges of the wyse, philosophy was to be studied not for its own sake, but ‘only for this ...”

“... Freud must be very unsettling to necessitate such cushions. Enright’s poem ‘Anecdote from William IV Street’ – about a request for the works of Freud and for an artwork of Jesus Christ – succeeds in its succinct ruefulness, the melting sentiment (as Eliot said of Goldsmith) just held in check by the precision of the language. But when telling us ...”

“... now she told me, though by the by she is sometimes dubious that I am ‘but a rough and roun’ Christian’ that ‘We should not be uneasy and envious because the wicked enjoy the good things of this life; for these base jades who lie up gandy-going with their filthy fellows, drinking the best of wines, and singing abominable songs, they shall one day lie ...”