“... Salvo, the narrator of The Mission Song, is the 28-year-old son of a Congolese woman and an Irish priest. Brought up in Catholic orphanages in Kivu and – for complicated reasons – Sussex, he has degrees from SOAS and Edinburgh and an unfaithful English wife who works as a journalist. At the beginning of the story, he has a freelance role as a ‘top ...”

“... Christopher Hill has shown literary critics the way before now. Many must have felt at least mildly chastened by his remarks in Milton and the English Revolution (1977), no less forceful for their studied moderation, on remembering the effects on Paradise Lost of censorship, fear, a social context in which men were hanged for expressing Miltonic opinions and judges expressed regret at not being able to order sentences of death by burning ...”

“... is going to a new school. He has hitched a ride with two men, a wool trader named Kuzmichov, and a priest called Father Christopher. At the beginning of the journey, as they leave the boy’s home village, they pass the cemetery in which his father and grandmother are buried: From behind the wall cheerful white crosses and ...”

“... not to tell the media about what has happened, and suddenly she and Dillon are in danger. A creepy priest comes to warn Dillon against giving evidence, but Dillon gives him a flea in his ear and leaves for England with Andrea. Fate, however, is not far behind ... Lies of Silence is a thriller – plot-centred, character-centred, not distractingly ...”

“... was any different. There, in its portable transparent box, was the earliest relic of the Book. In Christopher de Hamel’s history, the Rylands fragment is reproduced life-size in the final chapter: life-size but not, to my faulty memory at least, very true to its actual appearance. In the reproduction the papyrus is a kind of drab olive; in the Rylands, with ...”

“... in 1985.Of all those who gave evidence, one figure really stands out. Christian von Wernich was a priest and police chaplain. Later, in 2006, he would be charged with murder and kidnapping as part of the military repression, and in 2007 he would be sentenced to life imprisonment. But appearing before the court in 1985, he was a ...”

“... On 18 May 1593 a warrant was issued to ‘apprehend’ Christopher Marlowe, and on 20 May he was brought before the Privy Council for questioning. He was not detained, but was ordered to report to the Council daily until ‘licensed to the contrary’. This state of precarious liberty lasted only until 30 May, when he was fatally stabbed by a man named Ingram Frizer, though whether his sudden death was a matter of coincidence or conspiracy remains unresolved ...”

“... visitors to Garway in 1397 might have agreed. They found no ghosts, but much lively scandal. The priest Thomas Folyot ‘frequents taverns in an unruly and excessive manner’, and had revealed the confession of one of his parishioners during a drinking session. Another man, Hugyn oth’ Walle, was cited for abusing his wife, ‘often threatening to kill her ...”

“... is the double sense of ‘Once a ____, always a ____’ (knave, bishop, whore, thief, lady, patsy, priest ...). Sometimes this means that no X can ever change, for better or for worse; sometimes that when an X does change, nobody believes it. Both are good things to believe, and the proverb’s unduplicitous doubleness ministers to social vigilance, not to ...”

“... polite revenge of the clerisy upon the democratic egalitarianism to which it pays lip service. New priest does well to accuse old presbyter of authoritarianism.Averting their ears from any possibility of hearing a tu quoque, the radicals insist that it is their enemies who constitute a priesthood: ‘the death-of-language writers are self-ordained ...”

“... I inquired what the city intended to sacrifice in celebration of the annual feast of the god, the priest said: ‘As things stand the city has made no preparations … but I have brought with me from my own house a goose.’ Whatever the ritual preferences of Julian’s fellow believers (perhaps they chose to pray or burn incense or pour ...”

“... are looking along Arlington Road when it comes stealing through the market itself. It is led by a priest in a cape and an undertaker bearing a heavy rolled umbrella that he holds in front of him like a staff of office or a ceremonial cross. The procession is so silent and unexpected that it scarcely disturbs people doing their normal shopping, the queue at ...”

“... Krin and Spitting Image. Their jests have served to make the institution stronger than ever. Christopher Hitchens – although he can poke fun with the best of them – offers an unjestingly rational argument for abolishing the English monarchy. He begins with a perplexed description of the country’s convulsion on learning as the lead item on the ten ...”

“... appears to suggest a reason why Clift’s character, Michael Logan, should become a Roman Catholic priest. The war had made these characters, giving them confidence, troubling them with memories. So it was perhaps that the 1950s were the decade of neurosis. For all their resistance to the ‘torn T-shirt brigade’, even older stars such as John Wayne and ...”

“... found that even in London, it was a minority sect, at least until the early years of Elizabeth. Christopher Haigh, who describes himself as an ex-Methodist Anglican agnostic, decided that this revisionist band needed a leader, and headed into battle with a stream of publications that came to full fruition in English Reformations: Religion, Politics and ...”