“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Nonetheless a driving clarity of exposition pushes them along, these models of pre-Reformation Christian consensus and academic agreement on what constituted ‘Roman’ style. As we now feel about the early 20th-century modernists, so Charles’s court must have felt about the High Renaissance: in awe of an optimism still resonant but now ...”

“... inspired by the transcendent moment when the main character, Binx, observes someone who might be William Holden on the streets of New Orleans. Is he the real thing, or a ghost, a technological anticipation of holography, or just the manifestation of an awareness that such gods as Holden had become axiomatic, as much a model for American manhood as Johnny ...”

“... shook him, and why should he have to be prepared for such a reception? (He notes that his friend William Dalrymple, whose books about the Raj and imperial history are just as scathing as Empireland, wrote in the Guardian that ‘he had not received a single piece of similar hate mail from a British person.’ But then, as Dalrymple himself pointed out, he is ...”

“... 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 However, where the national movements were concerned, the PMAC, itself a Christian Amharic élite like the regime it superseded, stuck to the old imperial line.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for canonisation by the Catholic Church – not as a woman who forsook her native values for Christian values, but as one who found that she could, paradoxically, best fulfil the cultural values she inherited among a set of women who considered themselves Indian and Catholic. Even Metacom (or King Philip, as the New England colonists called him), who ...”

“... Early issues of Plebs included a series of articles on Greek and Roman economic development by William Craik, a railway worker from South Wales who had enrolled at Ruskin.Mansbridge, Craik, De Leon, the Plebs League, the WEA and Ruskin College find no place in Stray’s account. Their absence demonstrates the need for Hall and Stead’s book, which takes ...”

“... underpinnings of what is here labelled Warr’s ‘ideology of liberation’. That Warr was a Christian thinker of considerable depth and sophistication is manifest; so, too, is the interdependence of his claims for political and legal liberty with his insistence on the transcendence of equity in religious life, on the triumph of the spirit over mere ...”

“... Knox and all the propositions of the Catholic and Anglo-Catholic Churches. ‘Some Impediments to Christian Commitment’, which is a talk she gave at St Cuthbert’s, Philbeach Gardens just over two years before her death, is an account of her own spiritual history, a touching one, with her own particular sense of the sad and the ridiculous. It has never ...”

“... beginning: ‘Ah, what avails the sceptred race ...’ She was a peer’s sister and, according to William Hickey, died from eating too much pineapple. Literary trails became spicily intertwined at Chhatarpur, whither E.M. Forster, Lowes Dickinson and R.C. Trevelyan, the poet (son of George Otto) had travelled in 1912, with the usual side-trip to Khajaraho to ...”