“... I face More of the epic would be discovered under the sand as time went on. In 1990 Stephanie Dalley added more lines to her edition from newly recovered pieces, but most of what’s left has probably been smashed in the course of the Iraq wars. It seems proper that a place of fire and dust, its skin scarred by warfare, should be the origin of the story of the Flood today: devastation in negative, flood and drought bound together ...”

“... rulers nothing. Elizabeth I, in spite of ‘la mauvaise opinion’ which she held of Geneva after John Knox had written his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women there, found it convenient to mouth pious concern for her distressed co-religionists abroad; she was less ready to give them armies or subsidies. Charles I, profoundly ...”

“... the Sunday Times and the Cricketer magazine published his pictures; many of them are reprinted in Christian Ryan’s new book on Eagar’s work during that year’s English cricket season, Feeling is the Thing that Happens in a 1000th of a Second (Riverrun, £20). These photographs made Eagar’s reputation. I was a boy at the time, and had a subscription to ...”

“... Thames and Hudson volume Photomontage, which exposed a new generation to the interwar art of John Heartfield, George Grosz and Hannah Höch. The earliest of Linder’s collages have a graphic simplicity borrowed from fashion illustration, sometimes with a twisted take on ageing glam rock: one of the mocked-up female faces looks like Brian Connolly, the ...”

“... on Swift’s memorial tablet, a tablet that notably does not contain any mention of the usual Christian consolations – any hope of salvation or another life beyond this one. It is strange because Swift had distanced the satirical writings from his own feelings: they were written in the voices of personae whose attitudes and beliefs had been chosen ...”

“... numbers. If, in the process, it was discovered that the famous proof-text for the Trinity in I John was attested by almost no Greek manuscripts, though it existed in all Latin texts, manuscript and printed, what was to be done? It is, says modern scholarship, probably a late interpolation, designed to combat heretical denial of the doctrine. Leave it ...”

“... of a mass of detail, as if the sheer weight of her protestations would convince the world that John, as she calls him, was not guilty. It doesn’t work, even though one agrees that the coroner’s verdict naming Lucan as the murderer was unfairly reached, and it must have been a heartbreaking task. Marnham’s book is more reflective and very much ...”

“... boat. This time, however, it was not the thought of pretty girls that diverted him but his friend John Evelyn’s ‘pretty’ new book ‘against Solitude’. Evelyn’s Publick employment and an active life prefer’d to solitude, published in 1667, was written to refute Sir George Mackenzie’s 1665 work, A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Public ...”

“... of the Jewish village of Mifshata. Fassuta – a real place – is now part of Israel, and its Christian inhabitants belong to the 700,000-strong Arab minority inside the 1949 ‘green line’ of the Israeli state. Everyone in Fassuta has a story to tell, and the historical fact of dispossession means that this story is one of the few things they really ...”

“... of course, for Sam – whom they all called ‘STC’ in a sycophantic chorus, as he hated his Christian name – was blissfully happy in bed with Sara and never looked at Dorothy in that sort of way. And to turn the knife in the wound Sam had acquired such a lot of Wordsworthian self-righteousness, and if Sara spoke out at all would accuse her of being ...”

“... no longer mattered, and the nation ditched his serious music, retaining only ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and ‘The Lost Chord’ for old times’ sake. Henceforth he would be taken – or left – as a minor though by no means negligible composer who found his true vocation in giving Gilbert’s marionettes brief but memorable moments of ...”

“... chance of resuscitating an Aristotelian conception of practical reason than of restoring the Christian religion to cultural dominance. But in the judgment of some of the most acute participants in MacIntyre’s story – David Hume, for example, and more profoundly Machiavelli and Locke – it was the abandonment of Christianity which had by far the more ...”

“... he were a Marxist: ‘You know, they say Jesus Christ was the first Marxist.’ Asked if he were a Christian, he replied: ‘You know, they often say that Christianity was the forerunner of socialism.’ Why did the real Zyuganov not stand up before the election? Perhaps because there was no real Zyuganov, any more than there was a real election platform with ...”

“... Philippe de Champaigne gave when his daughter became a Jansenist nun – a Mary Magdalene and a John the Baptist – are in the exhibition. Neil MacGregor’s catalogue notes shed light on the choice of saints and make sense of their decorous presentation and of the place art could have among the spiritually frugal. St ...”

“... his heirs. Henry certainly needed all the heavenly help he could get. Succeeding his father King John while still a child of nine, and hastily crowned at Gloucester with improvised regalia, he had himself recrowned several years later at Westminster. He was to remain preoccupied with the symbols and reality of royal legitimacy for the rest of his ...”