“... When William Tyndale had completed his 1526 New Testament he set about learning Hebrew and translated from the original, with the aid of Luther’s version, the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch, which he issued in 1530. The signs are that Tyndale’s immersion in its patriarchal narratives and legal codes transformed his doctrinal views – in contrast to Luther, who tended always to regard the Old Testament as an embarrassment at best and a Jewish conspiracy at worst – and inaugurated that strange elevation of the Old Testament which still marks English and American culture ...”

“... back in Shit-Town, who treated her horribly when she was somebody else with a double-barrelled Christian name? You get the picture. The past won’t leave AnnieLee alone and she has to be beaten up by a couple of bogeymen who always seem able to find her and get into her room. Hold the bus: there’s one nice guy, he’s called Ethan and he’s handsome ...”

“... nicks the jelly, it’s all commandingly impersonal. The servicing of ‘the soft machine’ (as William Burroughs called the body) proceeds to anaesthetising muzak, and tomorrow or the next day my mother, only a little sore, will start to see the world again through her new synthetic lens. For me, there will just be a faint twinge, thinking how this keyhole ...”

“... though less widely recorded, among others. What there was, according to Favret, was the poet William Cowper, publishing The Task in 1785 in the aftermath of the American War of Independence, which must be considered a global war even if it did not involve the sheer manpower of the campaigns against revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Cowper is at the ...”

“... struck down with a deadly illness. The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607) by John Day, William Rowley and George Wilkins demonstrates some awareness of the doctrinal differences between the Sunni Islam of the Ottoman Turks and the Shia Islam of the Persians, stating that the Shia venerate ‘Mortus Ali’ (Ali ibn Abi Talib, the nephew of ...”

“... me more than the thought of dying,’ he told a friend in 1958. He was 52, had a well-tried Christian faith and would live another 25 years. Betjeman sits most comfortably alongside the Goons or Tony Hancock, quirky depressives of the wireless age whose voices speak to a disenchanted, disconnected world, laughing it all off until the red light in the ...”

“... else, not in the pub or the street, unless they were godly people who read the Bible at home, in William Tyndale’s translation, which practically invented what we regard as standard 16th-century-speak. The most we can claim for Tyndale, and for Cranmer, is that Bibles and Prayer Books made more extensive the bilingualism which the gentry had employed, at ...”

“... because few knew he had a squeaky voice, but several other on-field heroes – A.E. Stoddart, William Scotton, Arthur Shrewsbury – killed themselves after their careers ended, unable to cope with the loss of fame and/or money. Audiences demanded swagger in music too, forcing that poor ambitious provincial Edward Elgar to respond with ‘Land of Hope and ...”

“... political thought – not only Jeremy Bentham, but also his friend John Lind and the clergyman William Paley, whose Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) had gone through fifteen editions by the time of his death in 1805. The natural jurists’ arguments were soon interwoven with a more traditional political theology that emphasised ...”

“... by about 20 per cent. However, where the national movements were concerned, the PMAC, itself a Christian Amharic élite like the regime it superseded, stuck to the old imperial line. Along the northern marches of the empire, between the Sudanese frontier and the Red Sea coast, the revolutionaries were confronted by one of Selassie’s most intractable ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as a morality play, pitting nonviolence against racist violence, love against hatred. It is a Christian story of redemptive suffering and even martyrdom, as activists sacrificed their bodies to save the soul of America. The classic narrative begins with the court battles and grassroots protests against Jim Crow. By the end of the 19th century, the ...”

“... conscience to join the Independent Labour Party while at Oxford and together with his friend William Beveridge founded a society to study social questions (though it appears to have met only once). But Tawney, who held a classical scholarship, received glowing reports in his first year and clearly loved his time at Oxford, appears to have assumed he ...”

“... of his time, deeply attentive to poetry. As he made clear in a later review of The Idea of a Christian Society, he had little time for Eliot’s religious speculations. He was writing about a poem. The certainty of his judgment of ‘Burnt Norton’ cleared the way for Leavis’s fine Scrutiny essay on the second and third Quartets in 1942. ‘To have ...”

“... distorting the past. For Elton, the most troublesome of those turbulent priests was the Christian Socialist R.H. Tawney, author of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), who had certainly rubbed off on Bindoff in the common enterprise of teaching economic history in the University of London. For Elton, Tawney was a very good man but a very bad ...”