“... It examines community (flagellants, holy anorexics) and singularity (Napoleon’s body, or Martin Luther’s). Its subject, most often, is language about the body; even when historians are talking about piss and shit and flesh they’re usually talking about words, which is understandable if frustrating.One problem is that it’s so easy to forget that ...”

“... cheering ‘God Bless the King!’ It’s no surprise that The Wager is being made into a film by Martin Scorsese: it already reads like one (Killers of the Flower Moon is based on an earlier book by Grann).These impressive effects rely on some writerly liberties. The demands of the book’s narrative structure result in continual small rearrangements of ...”

“... on Convoy 69. On page 1043 is a snapshot of two Jewish boys boxing at a sports club at the Saint-Martin-de-Vésubie station in the Alpes-Maritimes; nine other boys crowd around. Only one, Isaac More, bare-chested and wearing short trousers, is identified. (He is shown in a colourful tunic on the tomb picture above the snapshot.) But who are the other ...”

“... the benefits of slave ownership and colonialism, could achieve the virtues of individual liberty. Thomas Friedman’s recommendations to the world’s stragglers included the ‘values of hard work, thrift, honesty, patience and tenacity’, as well as ‘export-oriented free market strategies based on privatisation of state companies, deregulation of ...”

“... Donne’s family​ were devout and prominent Roman Catholics, related on his mother’s side to Thomas More. Two uncles became Jesuit priests; one of them, Jasper Heywood, was briefly the leader of the Jesuit mission in England. In 1593 Donne’s brother Henry was arrested for harbouring a priest, and died of the plague in prison; the priest was ...”

“... Empson’s return from China; this fashion, led by such as C.S. Lewis and practised by such as Fr Martin Jarrett-Kerr, seemed interesting to others, who may thus have seemed, willy-nilly, to be crypto-Christians. One point of importance in this, as usual good, but as usual digressive, essay concerns Empson’s refusal to distinguish between the truth of ...”

“... than we should expect Keats to represent that of the early 19th century, or James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Anthony Burgess, Martin Amis (all OED2 authors) that of today. The opposite is true: we should expect the language of these writers to stand out in a contrasting way from current usage, although this will ...”

“... for the Society was not born with any sense of mission against the Reformation. Like Martin Luther, Loyola wished to transform and inspire the Latin Western Church, but their conversion experiences took them on opposite trajectories, respectively rebellion and obedience (of a sort). We should also dispense with the common idea that Loyola was a ...”

“... led to the exclusion not just of all Shakespeare’s poems and the single scene he wrote for Sir Thomas More but of three late collaborative plays, Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Cardenio. (The sorry consequences are clear enough, however: namely, the survival of Pericles only in an abominably printed and unreliable quarto and the permanent loss of both ...”

“... of these became cinemas. The Ideal on Lambeth Road, a Methodist chapel, was converted by the Rev. Thomas Tiplady in 1928 for screenings dedicated to ‘Cinema Evangelism’. The faces of the gathered few at the former Lambeth Workhouse shone with the conviction of true believers schooled to accept the occasional misconceived or inadequate sermon as the price ...”

“... for the Mission Continues, which has received donations from Bank of America, Disney, Lockheed Martin, Goldman Sachs, Starbucks, as well as thousands of people. (This becomes important later.) I won’t go on about how wonderful he seemed. Not because there’s a lack of material. Here’s Eric talking to another talk-show host, Charlie Rose: ‘Oxford had ...”

“... that developed between analytic and Continental philosophy, the latter epitomised by the likes of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. But the taxonomy is bizarre, as Bernard Williams once complained, since it contrasts a method or approach to philosophy with a geographical region, ‘rather as though one divided cars into front-wheel drive and ...”

“... think we know nothing of neurochemistry, he just emphasises how modest our knowledge is. He quotes Thomas Insel, the former head of the National Institute for Mental Health, who said after thirteen years in the job: ‘I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalisations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who ...”

“... sufferer from the complaint of Flaubert. The latter stood away from life as from a leprosy. And Thomas Mann, like Flaubert, feels vaguely that he has in him something finer than ever physical life revealed.’ Lawrence’s heroic vitalism, his belief that ‘physical life’ is the highest value we can know, includes a refusal of what he saw as the ...”

“... the plague? Gilman isn’t much interested in counter-examples, such as the words of the musician Thomas Whythorne during the outbreak of 1563 (quoted by the historian Paul Slack in his still unsurpassed 1985 study, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England): ‘I looked every minute of an hour when I should be visited as the rest were. I doubting the ...”