“... I was less than fifty pages into this first volume of John Betjeman’s Letters when I felt I must be in for an attack of tinnitus. I kept hearing shrieks of laughter. This condition was caused not by the poet himself but by the editor or Candida Lycett Green, his daughter, who seems to value nothing so much about her father as his ability to make people split their sides ...”

“... famous men. Where these orders of service used to be religious brochures offering blasts of Christian devotion, they are now ‘celebrations’ of the life, posthumous animations of the career, and summaries of the person behind the personality. In the old days, they might have been organised by a church verger in consultation with the family, but the ...”

“... from the nature of tragedy and the philosophy of Unamuno to the Jacobin terror, the works of John Stuart Mill, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Though the author is a distinguished academic, it is not a conventional academic study. It is a personal statement, a cry from the heart. Perhaps because of this, it ...”

“... on a weekly sitcom called The Danny Thomas Show. Danny Thomas was the son of Maronite Christian immigrants from Kahlil Gibran’s village, Becharre, in north Lebanon. His assimilation was so thorough that he took the Al Jolson role of cantor’s son in a 1952 remake of The Jazz Singer. On the show, it fell to Uncle Tannous to expose the Lebanese ...”

“... it made womanhood a lightning rod for attitudes to capitalist modernity. What Adam Smith’s pupil John Millar decried as the ‘habits of avarice’ of ‘polished nations’ generated much moral disquiet in 18th-century Britain. People fretted about ostentation and epicureanism, about the emasculation of manners and morals by ‘unmanly ...”

“... at the most straightforward level of weighing and measuring. It was an indication of the antiquary John Aubrey’s remarkably curious mind that he wanted to find out his height and weight. His careful accounts of weigh-ins take note of what he was wearing, whether he was carrying a sword and what he had in his pockets. When it came to his height, however, he ...”

“... were watching and the books they were reading. Lera: Françoise Sagan, Iris Murdoch, Susan Hill, John Updike (‘pointless’), Evelyn Waugh (‘black and unreadable’), Yuri Trifonov, the Kyrgyz author Chinghiz Aitmatov, books on yoga. Harold: mostly 19th-century classics, but also ‘one modern book a week’. The families exchanged presents: from England ...”

“... claim that Masonic roots were to be found among the Druids or the Essenes, Jewish monks of the pre-Christian era. Historians are more cautious, tracing the beginnings of the movement to the wandering, skilled stonemasons of the Gothic age, who needed some way of identifying each other and some unifying guild to protect their qualifications, though they allow ...”

“... socialist prig, with a prewar record as a fellow-traveller of Communism and an increasingly overt Christian commitment: a lean, ascetic man who notoriously became a vegetarian (for health reasons) in the 1920s; who became a teetotaller after entering Parliament, because he was shocked at how much drinking went on; who ultimately gave up his only conventional ...”

“... Still less could they claim that the French war was undertaken in defence of an ungodly and anti-Christian policy. The comparison suggests that religious discontent, added to an otherwise unchanged constitutional amalgam, could be a very powerful catalyst indeed. There is no parallel here to the cobbler of Hertford in 1640, who, hearing a man call the Scots ...”

“... In this instance, the Bible as a book was an effective instrument of change. The Gospel of John puzzles Schniedewind, as it does most of us. ‘John’s own written work,’ he writes, ‘began by defining the true Word as a person, not a text: “In the beginning was the Word (...”

“... Years ago Sir John Plumb declared: ‘The past is dead.’ He didn’t add: ‘long live history.’ But try as historians will to put the past behind them, others are always resurrecting it and abusing it for their own purposes. Take the mindless mouthings of ‘Victorian values’, the ‘good’ (or the ‘bad’) old days, the Dunkirk spirit, the ghost of Ramsay MacDonald – in all such sloganising, the ghosts of the past are conjured up to clinch arguments about the present ...”

“... with ‘the corduroy panzers’; dismisses the Poet Laureate as ‘poor old John Masefield’. Nor do the members of his own coterie fare much better. He is ‘wholly unsympathetic’ to Charles Williams’s mind, and although he has many warm and generous things to say about C.S. Lewis there comes a point at which he judges that ‘his ...”

“... with Roman Catholicism, to the extent that in the late 20th century, in the person of Pope John Paul II, it took charge of the latest episode in the history of a reactive, not to say reactionary, Counter-Reformation. One of the great merits of MacCulloch’s book is that it teaches us that all this, not to speak of what happened in Hungary and ...”

“... who’d ignored it earlier. I left then, for England; and my parents moved the next year to the Christian suburb of Bandra (one of the train stops at which a bomb went off on 11 July), an area on the brink of transformation in 1984, but still possessed by, and offering, a sort of enchantment. My parents lived here for five years before selling their flat ...”