“... spheres explains the approximation to a stable state which McNeill finds shortly before the Christian era. This stability was, however, upset by a new series of plagues and epidemics from the second century AD, leading to a thousand years of instability across Eurasia. Conflict also arose between the command system of empire and an emergent price ...”

“... would redeem society. Carpenter was Ashbee’s man, though the Guild, of course, was inspired by William Morris. This was in spite of the fact that Morris had thrown ‘a deal of cold water’ on the idea: for him, by that time, nothing would do short of revolution. But undoubtedly Ashbee had shown the Lamp of Sacrifice. He could perfectly well have salved ...”

“... operations when she was only two weeks old. By 1914 Humbert had been transferred a step upwards to William Beveridge’s new Labour Exchange Department, the inception of social security in Britain. Rejected (because of his weak lungs) by the Forces, he fought with courage and adroitness in the endless war between government departments, distinguishing himself ...”

“... it so good, because they amount to a profound analysis of what is fundamentally wrong with the Christian God.’ Empson (like Eliot, like Larkin) fashioned for himself a buffer persona, and equipped it with a repertoire of archaic slang. On one occasion, he intervened in a ‘small controversy’ about the wit of Marvell’s ‘Garden’ to suggest why the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”