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“... from Yorkshire was prosecuted by the High Commission for similarly provocative words about the Christian doctrine of life after death. ‘Tush tush,’ he declared. ‘That is but a tricke of the clergye, to cause the people to beleeve … to gett money and to catch fooles withal.’ For Vavasour, prayers ‘were noe better then the barkeinge of ...”

“... There​ are the known unknowns: the 52 sarsens – ‘Saracen’ stones, accessories to un-Christian religion – clustered on the bare Wiltshire upland. It is now agreed that the boulders of quartzite, weighing on average 25 tons, arrived at the site around 2500 BCE after a twenty-mile journey from the slopes south of Marlborough, and that the 44 bluestones nestled among them, igneous rocks of between two and five tons, had come eight times as far, from a hillside in Pembrokeshire ...”

“... case juxtaposes an iron restraining collar found in Birka in Sweden with a fine silver neck ring from Estonia, no doubt forged from the proceeds of the slave trade. Buddhism made no significant inroads west of India, where the rise of Islam didn’t help its chances, though the impact of the Buddhist monastic tradition on early ...”

“... right’ and associated ideas – advanced during the Enlightenment by the abbé de St Pierre, Christian Wolff, Jeremy Bentham and others – about how a global society, a civitas maxima, might be established and maintained. The construction of a perpetual peace on this scale would not be possible without treating the coarse timber of an all too tribal ...”

“... family is transposed: ‘R. is pleased with the simplification of the gods’ serving staff in the Ring.’ It is fitting that R. died on an Italienreise, one of the essential parts of the ‘cures’ of the 19th-century German bourgeoisie brought up on Winckelmann and Goethe. If Wagner’s work embodies the sufferings and greatness of the 19th century, his ...”

“... prescriptions, Delgado himself performed with intuitive flamboyance and died in the ring: a contradiction overlooked by Shubert, who documents every other paradox from the 18th century to the early 20th in an engrossing book replete with quotations and anecdotes. But Death and Money in the Afternoon is so loosely structured that the same points ...”

“... held up by the war, and finished with A.J.P. Taylor’s extra volume on 1914-45, does not much ring in the mind, except for its first two volumes (Collingwood and Myres, and Stenton) and Taylor’s. I doubt if the new one will fare any better. John Roberts, the general editor, does not show his hand in detail, and we must keep our fingers crossed about the ...”

“... is a pure variety. It is remarkable for tackling the problem of ordinariness. By an extension of Christian love, boring people are gathered together into the community of its characters. In the Christian congregations which figure in such novels they preponderate – the chorus of regular worshippers is usually ...”

“... killed poor Hattie Carroll,’ the song begins, ‘with a cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger.’ ‘William Zanzinger had 24 years/Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres’; Hattie Carroll ‘was a maid in the kitchen/She was 51 years old and gave birth to ten children.’ Ricks writes brilliantly about every word in the song, and about the ...”

“... he was getting out of it all – after all, he was very intelligent. Fraser’s parents were both Christian Scientists and ready to make serious sacrifices for their faith. (This cost Lionel a terrible death: a small skin cancer, which could easily have been removed, spread all over his body and eschewal of painkillers left him screaming in agony.) However ...”

“... peoples without; there is the hammock; there are populations which lie very close together in a ring to sleep, often round a fire; the old chroniclers of the invasions picture the Huns and Mongols sleeping on horseback. Even if these ways of using the body are felt by the agent to be actions of a mechanical or physical order, even if they seem to be ...”

“... of as the ‘Jerusalem syndrome’ that afflicts some visitors to the city, especially Western Christian tourists, who feel a need to register their presence in the Holy City by assuming the identity of a Biblical character, undergoing mystical experiences or succumbing to the delusion of possessing supernatural powers. Jerusalem, in other ...”

“... Brooks’s Reading for the Plot, and John Updike’s Hugging the Shore. There are also essays on Ring Lardner, on D.H. Lawrence, and on Structuralism, which Lodge as late as 1980 regarded as ‘the most significant intellectual movement of our time’. Such a collection is bound to be of uneven quality. Lodge is capable of writing a routine sentence ...”

“... were not compatible. And both were markedly unintimate. They disliked and distrusted the inner ring, the cosy clique, the people who know who to ask and how to reciprocate. They were loners who made a great show of common manhood, but who were much happier with women than with men. They did all this in different ways, however, and each would have abhorred ...”

“... what they liked in Lebanon. I ask with a touch of acrimony why we ever left ‘the middle’ and ring off. On the plane, I read Auden and MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland, which first appeared in 1937. Very funny in places, and Auden’s verse ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ is a triumph, though not in the same league as the great man ...”