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“... me:Distinguished turncoat, ex-Manichee, ex this and that,Preacher of chastity with a son in tow,A Christian pistoned by new-found fervour,Born of the desert sand in occupied land,Born my exact coeval but not my coadjutor,Bishop in Hippo brandishing anathemas,Bristling with intelligence not my intelligence,Black-hearted but indefatigable –Augustine! You know ...”

“... DNA: they understand each other, because, at some basic level, they are the same people. The Bling Ring (as the Los Angeles Times called them) already possessed many of the items they were stealing, but what they craved was proximity and identification. Anyone can have a Marc Jacobs handbag if they can raise the money, but it isn’t just anyone who can have ...”

“... young people just starting out. As in the earlier story, the older character’s troubles have a ring of reality while the young seem to exist on the edge of a fairy tale. Cordis is a bit of a ‘loon’ who is less than computer-literate. Celeste is a young neighbour who helps Cordis out by walking her dog, opening her mail and fetching her dry ...”

“... In Polish ears, the surname Norwid, and the Christian names Cyprian, Kamil, Ksawery, Gerard, ring alien, aristocratic, proud. Associated with the artist’s profession, they suggest a darling of fortune. Meanwhile the photograph of Cyprian Norwid which appears in school textbooks, the only one there is, dating from 1856, presents a man dismal in expression, with shaggy black hair, gaunt and even hungry-looking, tightly wrapped in a coarse overcoat ...”

“... raise the alarm because he knew the criminal. The reader of these opening anecdotes in Silence: A Christian History senses that MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford and one of the most lucid and authoritative TV historians ever, would prefer to stand by like the original dog, a quiet and eloquent witness to the hubbub and hurly-burly ...”

“... in the possible conversion of the rest of the world: after all, if others already glimpsed Christian verities through a veil darkly, they would surely embrace them if the veil could be swept aside. Of the Saracens, for example, Mandeville is persuaded that They knowledge well, that the works of Jesu Christ be good, and his words and his deeds and his ...”

“... are set on the page in the shape of a cherry tree. When she looks at a colleague’s mouth, a ring of words, ‘tooth gold tooth tooth gap’, is laid out in an oval around the word ‘TONGUE’. Downloaded directions are included for one journey, and another chapter takes the form of a list of objects seen and words overheard on a walk. Four chapters ...”

“... an art offensive as we are ever likely to see. The title of the show has a faintly evangelical ring, but its avowed purpose is not to proselytise. MacGregor remarks in his catalogue introduction that one third of the paintings in the National Gallery (and in comparable institutions) are of Christian subjects, though it ...”

“... The Dutroux affair, involving a paedophile ring, child-kidnapping and murder, might have surfaced in any country in the world. But would any other advanced, democratic country have been quite as slack as Belgium in taking action to track down the ring, and prevent further crimes? And is there something inherent in the way the Belgian state is organised which made the evident failure of the legal system almost inevitable? These are the questions which thousands of hitherto complacent Belgians are now asking, and they account for the enormous turn-out – around 3 per cent of the national population – for the ‘white march’ in Brussels on 20 October ...”

“... In pluralist democracy, government plays the role of wise and benevolent chairman, holding the ring for the great interests which ‘jockey’ for power, rather than controlling them. The power of these interests, notably the big corporations, was controlled, it was argued, not so much by government as by the ‘jockeying’ of all the other ...”

“... the Socratic Club, here described by one frequenter as providing ‘a good-humoured and high-level Christian debate’ in a room so crowded that students sat on the floor or under the piano. At its inception Lewis agreed to be the Senior Member of the University required by the Proctors to support and oversee any society or club proposing to include ...”

“... idea behind the exhibition is the traditional one: that Byzantium preserved classical art in a Christian form and then passed it on to the West, where it formed one of the taproots of the Renaissance. Part of the problem with this story, as Cyril Mango points out in his brief historical introduction to the catalogue, is that the idea of a single culture ...”

“... readers, finds it difficult to understand why Europe was so riven by murderous violence among its Christian population in the 16th century, because the rifts were over theological points that are meaningless to most people today, even Christians. The most dramatic moment in Zwingli’s career was its dénouement in 1531, when he was run through with a sword ...”

“... a Princeton musicologist: Prokofiev wanted to write simple, life-affirming music because he was a Christian Scientist. Sergei Prokofiev, born in 1891 and schooled in St Petersburg, left Russia in 1918 after graduating from the Conservatory. In the 1920s, when he was building his international career, Paris was his base. On his first visit back to Soviet ...”

“... a population divided by communal, sectarian and party hatreds, would be a pushover. Its Maronite Christian minority was thought an obvious ally for Israel against the forces of Arab nationalism, and the well-earned reputation of the Lebanese for commercial ingenuity and a capacity to survive in all circumstances suggested that they would be unlikely to die ...”