“... After Blake Milton criticism could be roughly divided into two camps: those who argued that Christian orthodoxy was central to the poem and those who detected unorthodox energies everywhere. C.S. Lewis admired the poem for its ‘mere Christianity’ and William Empson thought Milton should be honoured for the unsparing philosophical honesty of his ...”

“... Psalms are mirrors of ourselves and it was inevitable that, when English poets were still largely Christian believers, they would look into the mirror of this foundational anthology of poetry, as Chinese poets looked into the Confucian Book of Songs. In the Modernist era, the poets, as Pound wisecracked, have been more interested in Muses than Moses and ...”

“... in his preface to Orthodoxy, that he is seeking to offer ‘an explanation, not of whether the Christian faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it’. If he has come to believe it, it can be believed – what further demonstration could we want? The question is whether it should be believed. Chesterton thinks it should, but is ...”

“... beliefs is a kind of discrimination, her supporters say, and is happening because she’s a Christian or an evangelical or a woman. Ian Blackford, the MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber, who was leader of the SNP in the House of Commons until last year, is also a Free Church member. Why didn’t his religious beliefs warrant the same attention? The reason ...”

“... obscene’. So it is a comfort to find all these cruelties belied in the portrait of Moore by John Butler Yeats, reproduced in Gray’s book. There sits a harmless, walrus-moustached gentleman of 53, a little melancholy in expression, but by no means satyr-like, fresh-from-the-womb or squiffy. The year of the portrait was 1905, when Moore, surprisingly ...”

“... side on the podium translating his words as he speaks, rubs shoulders with Jerzy Kosinski, John Lennon and Arthur Cohen.) The cast of other characters is often barely credible, a hint perhaps that there is invention and embellishment in the seeming straight-talk: Casey and Teddy, ‘a couple of clowns from the days of vaudeville and silent ...”

“... The point, as Ruskin saw it, was not so much that attending to the Bible could lead to proper Christian practice: it directed the mind to the admiration of values beyond those of self-interest. He grew increasingly impatient of sectarian quarrels as he aged, and less and less inclined to identify with any church. The distinction he made was not between ...”

“... Between​ the third and fifth centuries of the Christian era the major world religions ceased to sacrifice animals to appease their gods. For reasons that remain unclear, a practice that had been central to devotional behaviour for thousands of years came to appear grotesque. Joseph Farrell observes that the practice of duelling is now similarly ‘uniformly judged as outlandish and incomprehensible’, its ‘canons and creeds … as beyond recall as the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians ...”

“... by a gust of testosterone and a few tumbleweeds of pubic hair: the Old Man, the Deep Male – Iron John. Iron John, a short work of psychological, literary and anthropological speculation by the poet Robert Bly, ‘dominated’ the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year, and has made, as we shall see, a heavy ...”

“... preface to this celebratory volume of essays presented to Dame Helen Gardner on her 70th birthday, John Carey apologises for the fact that the topics discussed are restricted to 16th and 17th-century English literature. Dame Helen’s latest book, after all, was The Composition of ‘The Four Quartets’. Eliot’s presence, though, still hovers over ...”

“... Some of us who are neither historians nor political scientists have by chance become aware, as was John Adams at the time, that what happened in the US between 1776 and 1783 was so demonstrably different from what happened in France ten or twelve years later, that to call them both ‘revolutions’ is merely obfuscating. Professor Hill, every inch a ...”

“... McFarlane to contribute to his biographical series ‘Teach Yourself History’ a short book on John Wyclif, an Oxford intellectual dead for six hundred years and the only arch-heretic bred in Catholic England before the Tudors and the Reformation. In one way this wasn’t surprising, since Rowse and McFarlane were friends. But in another way it was, since ...”

“... been called that when he was alive. The villagers called him ‘Pavel’, the proper form of his Christian name, or ‘Pasha’, a diminutive. ‘Pavlik’, another diminutive, was never used until the Komsomol press took it up. When Druzhnikov pointed out obvious contradictions between what they had experienced and the official version, interviewees often ...”

“... grave of Sir Robert Burton. The narrator traps him in the tomb, and masquerading as the avenging Christian, exorcises the holy vandal by terror. The story resounds with nice jokes about national decline and reverse colonialism. And the whole thing hovers on the edge of the utterly ridiculous – one of Theroux’s favourite territories. Not all The London ...”

“... scientists such as Faraday and Helmholtz – not to mention a host of lesser figures such as Hans Christian Oersted, whose work is celebrated in one of these essays. Unification is the Supreme Project of Science, metaphysical and religious in inspiration. Curiosity can only end with an understanding of the nature of all things. The integrity of Einstein’s ...”