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“... I was hired​ as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print ...”

“... on fantasy, as the best intelligence service in the world – an image reinforced by novels like John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl and Agents of Innocence by the American writer David Ignatius. In recent years, however, a number of scandals have badly tarnished the reputation of Israel’s security services and stimulated calls for greater public ...”

“... of the Jews’. The bubble was burst in 1963 by Rolf Hochhuth’s sensational play, The Deputy: A Christian Tragedy. This clunky five-hour drama about the Holocaust portrayed Pacelli as an icy and calculating schemer, heartlessly indifferent to the fate of the Jews, intent instead on protecting Vatican financial interests and maintaining Nazi Germany as a ...”

“... in Arabia but in Libya, and two centuries too early, but no matter: Muhammad was a foil for the Christian preoccupations of the day, heresy foremost among them. Muhammad, in the European imagination, was a repository of heresies: like Arius or Eunomius he thought Christ wasn’t as great as God; like Sabellius, he rejected the trinity; he was polygamous ...”

“... An owl and a scarab are among the images that gesture towards iconographies other than the Christian. Inside, the dream-like sensation of being in a place at once familiar yet oddly re-ordered continues with an architecture that speaks an ancient language with a curiously individual intonation. If its precise meaning is hard to catch, there is no doubt ...”

“... suffering has any special purpose in the divine scheme, thereby seemingly reducing the crux of Christian theology to vacousness. Pain appears to have become an embarrassment. Yet even if we don’t philosophise about it these days and have outgrown decadent Fin de Siècle glamorisation, in our daily dealings it remains as important as ever. It’s pain ...”

“... None of this affected Rodinson’s attitude to Islam and its history. His breach with the dominant Christian narrative was permanent. He died in 2004. Three years earlier, in an interview with Le Figaro published as an appendix to this new edition of Muhammad, he argued that violence wasn’t any more intrinsic to Islam than it was to other ...”

“... the Crucifixion has been engraved, with Christ at the centre, his arms outstretched, and Mary and John the Evangelist below. When turned over and viewed through the thickness of the egg-shaped cabochon, the scene of Christ’s painful sacrifice is magnified. Depending on the light source and your viewpoint, his body contorts this way and that, and Mary and ...”

“... writer such as Hume had no right to such marks of ‘politeness and respect’ from Christian gentlemen. This story, which opens Sher’s learned account of the 18th-century trade in Scottish literature, illustrates his belief that the form in which the Scottish Enlightenment was communicated to the world has been neglected and that the physical ...”

“... both to libel the unfortunate Vespucci, who had no intention of giving a new continent his Christian name, and to demonstrate his own integrity as an investigative author. Hemingway’s sense of accuracy on the page is the reverse effect of the lies he told about himself. Kipling, on the other hand, probably never told a lie in his life, although his ...”

“... no longer smiles.’ Britain is no longer a distinctively Protestant, even a distinctively Christian nation. There is no great likelihood of war with a European nation, no obvious enemy without; no empire; no commercial supremacy; no obvious new ground on which to rebuild the national identity of Britain. Whether the Union can survive without a clearer ...”

“... of ‘rational’ decision-making going beyond what any single human being might possibly will. Christian Gerlach has studied Nazi plans to extract food from occupied Eastern countries. When less food was forthcoming than expected, millions were put down for starvation. First in line happened to be Jews, who were done away with, not as Jews but as ...”

“... have kept all right so far this winter, but won’t brag.’ Three days later, in a note thanking John Middleton Murry for a presentation copy of one of his books, comes a sudden flash of intimacy almost painful in its nakedness: ‘I feel a sad sense of shortcoming at your good opinion of my writings & myself. I fear you do not know what a feeble person I ...”

“... scarcely a word of it; the wholly other and the all-too-human; the virgin ascetic who accused John Locke of trying to ‘embroil’ him with women, and the supreme London boulevardier whose consuming passions included Château Haut-Brion, the theatre and serial embroilments with women. Turn the page and the odd couple is joined by a third, for here ...”

“... as I explained to the late Princess Margaret on one of her visits to the Gallery, stands for the Christian soul. ‘How very, very Spanish,’ she pronounced slowly, after a moment or two pursing her lips. The Antiquary was published in 1816, not long after the Allies had insisted that the French return to Spain the paintings they had confiscated for the ...”