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“... of individual possessions, money and exchange, he derived general principles from the primitive Christian idea that the earth was a common treasury. He sometimes called for the abolition and redistribution of private property, sometimes for the free use of unplanted wastelands, and sometimes more narrowly for the distribution of confiscated Crown and Church ...”

“... of Ethics, a work that philosophers still mine, and the model for modern masterpieces such as John Rawls’s Theory of Justice and Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. But Sidgwick was one of those terrifyingly hard-working Victorians whose day job was a small part of what they got through, and although his moral philosophy gets very adequate treatment ...”

“... black hair and dark moustache, produced a quirky resemblance to Lenin. Although his biographer John Bew finds the likeness ‘somewhat forced’, he notes that contemporary observers as different in their politics as George Orwell and the Daily Mail made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David ...”

“... in fifty words is not worth including. To invoke a more constructive example, the makers of the Christian creeds showed how pregnant economy – ‘crucified, dead and buried’ – could get around the problem. A further alternative would be to adopt the stylised format of Who’s Who or Debrett (Henry VIII, 2nd s of Henry VII, qv, S 1509: m 1st, Catherine ...”

“... Ruskin’s biography they mean a great deal. Briefly, the story is of Ruskin’s acquaintance with John and Maria La Touche, whom he probably met in 1858, four years after the annulment of his marriage; his growing love for their younger daughter Rose; his realisation that his feelings for her were romantically loving; his proposal of marriage in 1866; her ...”

“... He is a real person. I met him once and talked with him. He was amiable and decent, or distant.John Bleasdale’s The Magic Hours is both a monument to unstoppable research and, in the end, an admission that even such a thorough inquiry can remain inconclusive. Bleasdale hasn’t been able to talk to Malick, or to his family. But he has interviewed some of ...”

“... and takes a chance on ‘wilderness’; the coloniser blindly penetrating new territory; the Christian having a first unmediated encounter with Creation. ‘Glory pulsed in her gut; she, a nobody, a nothing, going farther than any man of Europe had yet gone in this place so new to their eyes.’ Suddenly, Groff’s premise seems not so much sparse as ...”

“... other canonical poet of the English language, with the possible exception of his great antagonist John Milton, he was conscious of the previous uses by other writers of the words he deployed in his poems. But what exactly is the difference, one can’t help wondering while reading such notes, between an interesting allusion or echo and a mere verbal ...”

“... popular legend is that the BOP was a long-term bestseller. But as McAleer shows, locked into its Christian and anti-masturbation propaganda mission, the RTS weekly was almost immediately overtaken by the more market-responsive publications of the commercial publishers. By 1900, ten years after its launch, the BOP was a lame duck, subsidised by the RTS, and ...”

“... especially, and valuably, proficient in Coptic, a language that had devolved since the early Christian era into a purely liturgical medium but which was known to be continuous with ancient Egyptian, and, in its written form, used letters of the Greek alphabet along with signs it had taken over from the old Egyptian cursive script. It was by extrapolating ...”

“... The Bounty saga, featuring Banks’s breadfruit again, is wrapped up in six pages. Bligh and Christian, old shipmates, are declared ‘heterosexual’, and we are reminded that Bligh eventually completed his mission, and that ‘AFRICA’S dark sons’ in the West Indies thought the breadfruit not worth the trouble. Gavin Kennedy, in Captain Bligh: The ...”

“... ones so that the territory on the wrong side of the line would nonetheless be Spanish, and Christian. The thrust of these first inventors of an idea of the South Sea was towards hegemony and ownership, and it did not change greatly over the next 350 years. The rites of possession by empires were repeated over and over. Turning the sod, burying pennies ...”

“... from the Stalin Peace Prize which he had won the year before was icing on a substantial cake. John Butler is a Canterbury man and an emeritus professor at the University of Kent, best known for his book The Quest for Becket’s Bones. The dean now and then compared his own struggles for truth with those of St Thomas, though the dean’s bones and indeed ...”

“... children’s book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published in 1950. His standing as a Christian apologist has risen even more remarkably in these years. At the time of his centenary, Christianity Today announced that he had come to be ‘the Aquinas, the Augustine and the Aesop of contemporary evangelicalism’, a list suggestive of deep ...”

“... recently with a Cabinet Minister will know that it is not just the labourer who is thus incapable. John Buchan, whose grandson I am, was a late and flesh-and-blood representative of that lost epoch before economic expediency: a writer who not so much rejected the division of labour (Baudelaire and the Romantics do that) as overcame it. He fascinated his age ...”