“... What​ do we know about St Patrick? Most people could probably place him in Ireland, amid every short cut to Irishness – shamrocks, Guinness, lots of green things – while a little more knowledge may attach to him the legend that he is responsible for Ireland’s lack of snakes, having ordered them all to leave. The picture becomes more complicated for those who have discovered that he wasn’t Irish at all but from somewhere in the island of Britain, captured and enslaved by Irish raiders, escaping home and then returning to the land of his captivity, to convert the Irish to Christianity and preside over the Irish Church as bishop in Armagh ...”

“... The quatercentenary commemorative King James Bible (KJB) sits on my desk as I write: a satisfying artefact in its chocolate livery enriched by opulently gilded top, tail and fore edges, with stout chocolate slipcase to match, impressive in its folio bulk, though not nearly as bulky as the originals of 1611, which needed a sturdy lectern to bear them, announcing their presence with a swagger equal to the most majestic of England’s medieval church buildings ...”

“... The Middle East​ isn’t short of ruins (there are many more now than there were a few years ago), and until the turn of the millennium archaeologists believed that those at Khirbet Qeiyafa, twenty miles south-west of Jerusalem, belonged to a large farm of the fourth to third centuries bce. It was an interesting, ancient but hardly unusual site. But then excavations beginning in 2007 revealed something of much greater antiquity and significance ...”

“... Historians​ make themselves useful by organising thoughts about the past, hacking it into conceptual chunks, some of which take their place in a framework of historical cliché. Most people in Western cultures are comfortable with the terms ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘medieval’ as points of reference, regardless of the way the shifting frontiers of historical research alter our understanding of what they might mean ...”

“... The publication of this definitive edition of the Book of Common Prayer heralds a significant anniversary; it is 350 years since the final version of the book was authorised by Parliament in 1662. It comes hard on the heels of the quatercentenary celebrations last year for another milestone of Stuart English prose composition, the King James Bible, and although I was surprised by the large amount of public interest shown in that commemoration, I doubt whether the Prayer Book will have such an impact ...”

“... Next autumn​ marks the half-millennium since an event now so mythic that some have doubted it ever took place. If it did, the date was 31 October 1517. The main actor belonged to a religious Order known as the Hermits of Saint Augustine, Martin Luther by name, though he also tried out a hybrid Greek/Latin polish for his surname by dressing it up as ‘Eleutherius’, ‘the freed man ...”

“... In the mid-18th century​ an exceptionally adventurous European traveller might have got as far as a desert region in what is now Arizona, to be rewarded with hospitality from the presiding priest in the stately local mission church. There was likely to have been chocolate to drink, transported from Yucatán some two thousand miles to the south, served in Fr Philipp Segesser von Brunegg’s choice of cups: would he select his Chinese porcelain or his stoneware from Europe? Fr Segesser had called on his family in Switzerland to send over a steady supply of useful tools for the local Indigenous people – knives, spoons and waffle-irons, maybe an occasional discreetly packaged weapon or two ...”

“... Where might you seek Jerusalem? You could start in Bologna, which since at least the ninth century CE has boasted a Jerusalem theme park called Santo Stefano, a complex of churches and chapels around the octagon of San Sepolcro. At the centre of San Sepolcro’s columned Romanesque splendour is a full-size medieval reproduction of the superstructure of the Holy Sepulchre, which helps us understand what it looked like before its custodians accidentally set fire to it in 1808 ...”

“... Evesham​ in Worcestershire is one of those agreeable English provincial towns whose modest size preserves its medieval layout. It’s not hard to notice the absence at the heart of the town, a great green open space once occupied by a massive Benedictine abbey. Little of it is left: the remains of two monumental entrance gates plus a lofty detached bell tower, the latter dwarfing the two parish churches that once respectfully flanked an abbey church as large as Worcester or Gloucester Cathedrals ...”

“... last few years have seen a remarkable surge in studies of the Reformation period and this book by Diarmaid MacCulloch is the piece which completes the jigsaw, putting at the centre of the first half of the 16th century Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop with the beard who created the Church of England. Cranmer’s beard dominates the cover. Instead of the ...”

“... it was reported in August that the Bishop of Northampton has begun a suit for his canonisation. Diarmaid MacCulloch doesn’t invoke Chesterton’s miracle-working powers, but he opens this expanded version of his 2012 Gifford Lectures with a Father Brown story, ‘The Oracle of the Dog’: by howling at a certain time, the animal gives the priestly ...”

“... a four-volume set of 72 reprinted essays. It’s still an industry, and hardly a cottage industry. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation is a better book on the subject as a whole than anyone has managed to write for a long time. The architecture of the book is impressive, both massive and elegant, and above all logical in its progression, and ...”

“... directions about this, or that there has been any consistency in the attitudes of the Church, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Lower than the Angels will come as a corrective. This is not a polemical book, but an erudite, judicious and often sympathetic account of Christian history, in all its complexity, by a historian and theologian with impeccable ...”

“... with in the early pages of this book. A thousand pages later, as it reaches a temporary halt, MacCulloch is equably discussing some of the very latest things in religion, and recording the almost incredible success not only of Roman Catholicism but of a great diversity of lesser churches and sects. As nearly always, he explains these diversities ...”

“... on the Sundays around Easter. But this was not quite what Cranmer intended. As his biographer, Diarmaid MacCulloch, has insisted, worship for Cranmer entailed the profound commitment of the frequent Eucharist. He would neither have understood nor approved of an ‘Anglicanism’ (a term he could never have encountered) which celebrates, as the jewel ...”