“... about its origins and bring alive again the inquirers and artists who have gone before him. William Borlase was the vicar of Ludgvan in Penwith. At 52 he felt ‘his energies starting to dim’ but then, in May 1748, he ‘happened to bump into two distinguished antiquarians’ – also parsons, needless to say – and what he told them about local ...”

“... in Montclair, California, witnesses saw between five and eight police officers sitting on top of Christian Siqueiros, who subsequently died of a heart attack.From the early 15th century until the late 18th century, peine forte et dure, punishment by pressing, was exercised under common law against men and women accused of capital felonies who insisted on ...”

“... the church’s ‘maladjusted economy’. They were the inventors of the analysis, beloved of William Tyndale and many early Protestants, that ‘Popery’ had grown up because it was for the profit of the clergy. It was this belief which enabled early Protestants, up to and including Jewel, to believe the mists of Popery would disperse before the clear ...”

“... an element of the standing critical wisdom. Many of his former antagonists have now moved to what William James thought of as the third phase in the assimilation of a threatening new idea. First they said it was absurd, then that it was peripheral, now they want to claim it as their own creation. So Bloom has in a sense won his battle. In doing so, he may ...”

“... into cultural originality.’ Having taken the cultural lead America could now export what William Carlos Williams called its ‘rich regenerative violence’ to the rest of the civilised world. This isn’t the usual history of the modern, and it could be contested: the three cities of Dada are Zurich, Paris and New York, in that chronological ...”

“... geology would amplify or clarify the biblical account. In this way, one could be both a devout Christian and a scientist, as William Buckland and Adam Sedgwick, the two leading British geologists of the 19th century, were. Of course, biblical literalism resurged periodically, notably in the US. But the majority of ...”

“... but now she saw only leeches and fools: the pioneer had given way to the breadliner. She was a Christian, and knew her duty, ‘but I find my heart is getting harder. I can have no least sympathy for people any more who can do and will only holler there is no chance anymore.’ Wilder’s parents lost their savings in a bank collapse during the depression ...”

“... extraordinary travels and his eventual aspirations as a free man – which range from being a good Christian to learning the French horn. Equiano stayed with the godly and genteel Guerin sisters in Greenwich, and took ‘many opportunities of seeing London, which I desired of all things’. He tried training as a hairdresser in the Haymarket, he went to ...”

“... works designed for a popular audience, like the Ars moriendi, guiding the reader towards a good Christian death, or The Apocalypse of St John (John’s vision of a celestial battle between good and evil), or the Biblia pauperum, with images of Old and New Testament stories. Some block books were hybrid works, combining woodcut images and handwritten ...”

“... was that in the 1620s, under the leadership first of Richard Neile and then more decisively of William Laud, it was annexed to Charles I’s programme of political ‘absolutism’. Trevor-Roper does not describe the precise content of that programme. If it existed, then the constitutional objectives of the Puritan ‘contrivers’ were surely genuine ...”

“... Hanoverian monarchy and, especially, in the light of certain assumptions about the crisis made by Christian Friedrich Stockmar, that calculating and high-minded Coburg physician, and his employer Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld (this last was exchanged for Gotha in 1826). Their outlook could fairly be summarised in the following terms. Europe (and in ...”

“... are here translated as Unmodern Observations by different hands, under the editorship of Professor William Arrowsmith of Boston University. The first of them, a satirical attack on The Old Faith and the New, a work of David Strauss’s dotage (1871, English translation 1873), begins with a memorable disclaimer. The German public’s eagerness to infer from the ...”

“... half a century of preoccupation with dreams, hysteria, hypnosis and divided personality led up to William James’s chapter on ‘The Self’ in his textbook of psychology, published before Erikson was born. Brothers William and Henry: there were two with identity tangles to sort out! All the same, it was only as society ...”

“... originated in the impact made by Evangelical revivalism on a young Glasgow textile merchant, William Smith. Deeply influenced by the military volunteer movement and active in Nonconformist mission work, he confronted the social worker’s familiar problem – that of seeking to retain influence over the teenager who has left school but has not yet ...”

“... conceptions of the great roles. So he began by quoting a weighty commonplace from another critic, William Archer, twenty years Agate’s senior. ‘We have each our private ideal of Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Lear,’ said Archer. ‘Every actor who undertakes them has to pass through a triple ordeal, encountering, first our imagination, kindled by ...”