“... 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 ...”

“... of exploitation. The Church taught the peasants that the Jews had killed Christ and anyway needed Christian blood for their unleavened bread at Passover. When Poland literally disappeared after the Partitions, sliced up by Prussia, Russia and Austria, many Jews joined with the Poles in their struggle for nationhood, but they never gained full acceptance. To ...”

“... has everyone been of the charge of anti-semitism that the stranglehold of the neo-conservative cum Christian Right cum Pentagon civilian hawks on American policy is now a reality which forces the entire country into an attitude of undifferentiated bellicosity. The idea that Iraq’s population would have welcomed American forces entering the country after a ...”

“... of his friend and bishop, Cuthbert Tunstal, he turned to refute the English disciples of Luther, William Tyndale chief among them. In this interest More produced nearly a million words in half a dozen years, for half of which he was Lord Chancellor. By the end of 1533, when he gave over writing of this kind, the effort had helped to bring him close to ...”

“... that there were 3200 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, 700 more than its capacity. I heard Major General William Brandenburg, who oversees US military detention operations in Iraq, say: ‘We’ve got a normal capacity and a surge capacity. We’re operating at surge capacity.’ A year before, I had heard the President promise ‘to demolish the Abu Ghraib ...”

“... limed oak. It was this house where Eric Korn heard someone reading out the plaque as being to ‘William Butler Yeast’. ‘Presumably,’ Eric wanted to say, ‘him responsible for the Easter Rising.’ 17 February. Stopped by a man outside the post office in Regents Park Road who fishes in his wallet and shows me a note I sent nearly 50 years ago to ...”

“... a very strange poet. The usual account of this strangeness, until fairly recently, was to say as William Empson did in the introduction to the selection of Coleridge’s poems he edited with David Pirie: ‘Coleridge wrote only a few very good poems.’ Debate has turned essentially on the question of which those poems were. Defending the edition he was by ...”

“... post-feudal Indian middle class and members of the British scholarly and administrative classes. William Jones, whose researches at the Fort William College in Calcutta were largely responsible for inaugurating Orientalist scholarship and the reconstruction of Indian history, wore native clothes made of muslin in the heat ...”

“... the successes of what he called the English Church over irritating Britons and the obstinate Christian Irish. Burrow takes time to describe a return to secular annals and chronicles between the 11th and 14th centuries, before the emergence in Florence, in the 15th and 16th, of what has come to be called ‘humanist history’. It is an entertaining ...”

“... he can be glimpsed in the glare of what was going on around him.’ In 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, Shapiro observed the paradox that while Shakespeare ‘more so, perhaps, than any writer before or since … held the keys that opened the hearts and minds of others’, he ‘kept a lock on what he revealed about himself’. It is as if the ...”

“... and the Riviera. Stephen Crane’s birthplace is now a children’s playground in New Jersey, William Faulkner’s a Presbyterian parsonage. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States, from which these titbits come, provides further unwitting refutations of its own project, which is to fix American writers in their proper locales: ‘It ...”

“... that connected the President to the triumvirate of Deaver, Baker and Edwin Meese, who, joined by William Clark, ran the first term While House. These younger subordinates looked after Reagan; Regan treated him as a peer. Deaver in particular functioned as the Reagans’ factotum, but if he stood in for their estranged sons, he did so by reversing the ...”

“... Eastern Seaboard all the way up to Newfoundland, anywhere which was not already occupied by ‘any Christian prince or people’ (no look-in for Native Americans, of course). This arrogation was all the more sweeping because back in England the pattern of land ownership was still very varied. John Darby’s huge estate map of Smallburgh, Norfolk, dated a year ...”

“... and then rejected by the Japanese government, officially because it was too melancholy and too ‘Christian’, but probably also because it assaults and deconstructs martial patriotism, replacing it (in a gentle, Mahlerian final movement) with a vision of comity and brotherhood. He was the explorer of shifting tonalities, wayward harmonies, creeping ...”