“... an illiterate Cardiff fisherman. William Hunter was 19 years old, a silk-weaver’s apprentice; a priest sneered at him: ‘It is a merye worlde when such as thou arte shall teache us what is the truth.’ Thomas Tomkins, a weaver, was burned after Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, had forcibly shaved off his long evangelist’s beard ‘so he wold loke like a ...”

“... Bruno quite well. He too was an habitué of the French Embassy, in which he served for a while as priest and confessor. He was also a spy for Sir Francis Walsingham, supplying him with a steady stream of intelligence from within the Catholic enclave of the Embassy. His letters and reports, written in French, remain among the State Papers at the Public Record ...”

“... of the arising comparisons are relatively simple ones. Both Joyce and Rushdie write about being priest-ridden. Both come from countries dismembered by the British Empire. Both exiled themselves to metropoles like Paris and London. Both kept in touch with their respective homelands nonetheless. But it is when he attends to the language that Al-Azm ...”

“... is playing ‘Dixie’. A man got his hand outstretched. Could be the Führer, could be the local priest. You know sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace. The Führer or the local priest? Does the Church collide with or collude with Fascism? But as Skidelsky acknowledges, Mosley’s ‘peace campaign’ was notable for ...”

“... at the local asylum about Marcus Aurelius and the importance of stoicism, and in the fatuous priest in ‘In the Ravine’ who, at dinner, comforts a woman who has lost her baby while pointing at her with ‘a fork with a pickled mushroom on the end of it’. Yet the son did not abandon the father. Once the Chekhovs had moved to Moscow, Anton calmly ...”

“... Much time is spent in the company of Egan’s uncle, Carl Bob Feeney, an ancient Irish ex-priest who boasts of his likeness to ‘the expatriate atheist writer Samuel Beckett’. With his equally decrepit friend Ulrich, Feeney devotes his remaining days to rampaging around the lakeside sermonising on behalf of the animals, even inducing Egan to recite ...”

“... causes were forced to explain to themselves why they had lost, why ‘new presbyter is but old priest writ large,’ or why the Saints had visibly failed to reign. To those who believed their cause was God’s, the experience was as traumatic as any suffered by Job. So far is common ground: the defeat of 17th-century radicalism was long-lasting and ...”

“... not because it’s Mexican,’ yelled Angel in Carlos Fuentes’s magnificent dystopia, Christopher Unborn. We may be on dodgy ground, then, lumping together two Mexican novels – one about the South American uprising of 1810 and one about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at the end of the 15th century – but for the fact that both try to ...”

“... he was taken on as a designer and cartoonist in 1927. His boss, Norbert Wallez, was a charismatic priest of anti-parliamentary, Germanophile views – Protestant Prussia excluded – who believed that Jews and Freemasons were behind the Versailles treaty. In his office Wallez kept a signed portrait of Mussolini inscribed: ‘To Norbert Wallez, a friend of ...”

“... believers, cultivating like so many urban gardeners the individual conscience as against some priest-given ‘religious consciousness’? The italics here are mine – mine, who am no Polish bad or lapsed Roman Catholic but an Englishman bred, unless I am mistaken, much nearer than Edward Thompson to the heart of English Dissenting Protestantism. And ...”

“... bag from Gristede’s over there.’ Reminders that he might have ended up a ‘cop or tough priest’ in Albany only cement his position at the top of the story’s chain of being. To Theo, in Las Vegas, his letters carry ‘a whisper of quiet rooms and money’. Theo, like Richard in The Secret History, moves easily between the levels of grandeur on ...”

“... mother died during his birth. Brought up in an English poorhouse and educated by a paedophile priest, he claims to have had numerous adventures around the world – including an unlikely stint in Louisiana, where, he says, he learned painting from a certain ‘Jean-Babeuf Audubon’, presumably a near relative of John James Audubon. On returning to ...”

“... of ‘excluding them. They say it’s a lie that writing is a religion requiring the devotion of a priest. They say it’s ridiculous.’ One student is ‘concerned that so much of the assigned reading includes books that failed to make money or are now out of print. Shouldn’t we be studying more successful writers?’ Morale isn’t high among the faculty ...”

“... and its ways, seem simply to have been found, not made. And how simply. These are arts which Christopher Burns has yet to master. There are others, however, of which he already has an impressive command. Snakewrist, a first novel of unusual promise, is far too concerned with getting across a message to sustain over its full length the illusion of being ...”

“... play consists of the couple’s frustrating attempts to negotiate financial terms with a passing priest and then to keep to them; at the end, even force fails to bring about Sarah’s entry to the ranks of the respectable poor and the priest is ‘master of the situation’. The point, however, is that she has had her ...”