“... 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 ...”

“... of Greek and Roman art. Ned’s chief assistant in this enterprise was the great love of his life, John Marshall. The two met at Oxford, where Marshall was an outstanding student. Many of his contemporaries believed that the young man might become a great Classical scholar, but he chose to serve as Ned’s secretary. He received a regular salary, but he was ...”

“... nothing can be different than it is. Spinoza made it clear that he was not talking of the Judaeo-Christian deity, but a purely philosophical being. He then worked out a stoic-like ethical system in which the highest good for man is to see the world from the aspect of eternity, and to achieve the intellectual love of God. As Richard Mason reminds ...”

“... at Pennington, with an 1170 Norse inscription and also a recently excavated sheelagh-na-gig (a pre-Christian mother-goddess exposing her vulva); Swarthmoor Hall, where George Fox established the Society of Friends, and got the squire who was protecting him in trouble with the locals; and Conishead Priory, a magnificent piece of 19th-century phoney Gothic whose ...”

“... machines were associated with hooliganism in the early 1960s and were briefly banned by the Christian Democrat Government). Meanwhile, he was moving further and further away from traditional Communism, towards Thirdworldism. This led to an interest in Cuba, which he visited for the first time in 1959. He soon became a close friend of Castro’s (he was ...”

“... more mocking posture, in another century and in another country, assumed by the American president John Adams: “It will never be pretended that any person employed . . . had interviews with the gods, or was in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven.”’ Wittreich spends the rest of the paragraph glossing Adams, and then moves on. Notice how his ...”

“... to the Roman people at the dedication of the Lateran Church that Constantine built’ (i.e. St John Lateran), and Sylvester, in the robes of papal office and attended by servants with holy vessels. True, the sculptor had failed to enter the year when all this happened. But the quality of the carvings, which resembled the crude reliefs on the Arch of ...”

“... of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, these three sovereigns – and any other Christian rulers who wished to join them – would unite in a Holy Alliance to govern according to the principles of fraternity and justice. They would dispense with wars among themselves and put aside the political and confessional divisions that had long ...”

“... an uproarious visit to Edinburgh and Glasgow by ‘sixteen French socialist workmen’, the orator John Bruce Glasier proclaimed: ‘We are hastening to reach the City of the Commune before night falls.’But as Forster points out, solidarity with Commune veterans on the part of British working-class movements was usually more symbolic than active. Plenty of ...”

“... flood of refills’. Yet the attraction serves a serious purpose. Built by an evangelical Christian group called Answers in Genesis (AiG) and completed in 2016, the Ark Encounter makes the case that the story of Noah occurred exactly as told in Genesis: that humanity was saved by the eight people who built the vessel and boarded it together with seven ...”

“... congregation were in tears.’ When he had become a celebrity, men as notoriously irreligious as John Wilkes and David Hume attended church services to hear him preach. ‘Tristram pleads his cause well, tho’ he does not believe one word of it,’ Wilkes noted with satisfaction. Reading his sermons, Thomas Gray thought that they showed ‘a sensible ...”