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“... otherworldly theology is, in practice, the ally of reaction and tyranny. The failure of the German Christian Churches to make any effective protest against Hitler and, on the other hand, the heroic anti-Hitler action of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (against his Lutheran conviction that politics are no part of the business of the spiritual man) brought home to many ...”

“... their numinous aura. As Pope Gregory the Great remarked in his instructions of 601 for the Christian conversion of England, people were more likely to worship in places with which they were already familiar: pagan idols had to be destroyed, but the temples themselves should be kept and converted to ...”

“... school of Letterfrack, with its unmarked grave for delinquent boys, who were abused by the Christian Brothers in a town that turns its back to the sea. As I drive along this road, the weatherman on the radio promises a day ‘bog agus gaolach’: soft and windy, or, as translated half an hour later, in the English language forecast, ‘blustery, with ...”

“... apart from Roy Jenkins, the other heroes are the usually unsung civil servants: Lee, O’Neill, Robinson, Butler, Palliser etc, who shepherded us into the Community with a skill and persistence which almost made up for the visionless complacency of their predecessors of the 1930s and 1940s. Young is impressed by Heath’s ability at their crucial meeting in ...”

“... Chancellor,’ ‘Christ died an Unbeliever,’ It appears to me Now that Tom Paine is a better Christian than the Bishop,’ ‘A Last Judgment is Necessary because Fools flourish’. None of these is funny ha-ha, but while the brow may be furrowed with indignation there is a twist of humour at the corners of the mouth which is also part of the ...”

“... whose intense, unique vision led him to create his own philosophy and mythology. He was a Christian who despised Christianity. He was an extremely private person who retreated from society. But he was tortured by his rejection of the world: he wanted fame – and yet he did not want to be tainted with success. This is James King, who despite having ...”

“... beliefs is a kind of discrimination, her supporters say, and is happening because she’s a Christian or an evangelical or a woman. Ian Blackford, the MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber, who was leader of the SNP in the House of Commons until last year, is also a Free Church member. Why didn’t his religious beliefs warrant the same attention? The reason ...”

“... rich and lively history, did a practice tolerated by the ancients and largely ignored by Judeo-Christian moralists, come to be seen as the height of erotic depravity? Laqueur, who teaches at Berkeley, is the author of Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), one of the most heavily cited and argued about books of the last few ...”

“... womanly, suffused with the traditional female vices of profligacy and sensuality. If Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was Economic Man in the heroic mode, he was shadowed by Economic Woman: Moll Flanders, the emblem of an age of passions run rampant. Not everyone shared this pessimism. A very different mood could also be found in Enlightenment Britain, as ...”

“... should be nervous, and, where the subject will with propriety bear elevation, sublime.’ Mary Robinson (described by Coleridge as ‘a woman of undoubted genius’, but perhaps too full of dim memories of Gray and Milton quite to deserve that praise) duly described the moon as ‘sublimely still, and beautifully pale!’ In ‘On Bamborough ...”

“... the work of Mallarmé, Verlaine and Valéry, set him apart from his fellow pupils at Kimberley’s Christian Brothers College. In his late teens a chance conversation with the philosopher J.N. Findlay, whom he met on a cruise ship, inspired him to abandon the architecture course on which he had embarked at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and ...”

“... faded. We were left with a still photograph of date palms at sunset. ‘Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson’ was played by violins. It was time for the News. President Saddam Hussein would feature heavily in that, too. This is landscape I have explored before. Romanian Television used to call Nicolae Ceausescu ‘our bright morning star’ and ‘our ...”

“... of experience, if only one of several made available by verse. To set Sleeping rough beside Peter Robinson’s latest recension, This Other Life, is to recover a sense of the depths which belong to places which exist then as well as there. Robinson’s fidelity to life’s temporal infrastructure, its recessive inward ...”

“... than is the wealthy Jeremiah French, just as he is more like a clergyman (and a primitive Christian) than the boisterous Mr Porter. Turner’s tart reactions to his betters are rather like those of an NCO observing the officer class; suppressed rancour jaundices his descriptions of social life in East Hoathly. His excellence as an observer derives ...”

“... spurred on by the medical profession, set out to curb the tobacco industry. They were Kenneth Robinson and David Owen (Labour) and Sir George Young (Tory). All three were routed. The hardest fighter of the three was Sir George Young. His determination to cut down, for instance, on tobacco’s sponsorship of sports made him unpopular in those parts of the ...”