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“... the Utilitarians, when we think of the period as an era of freedom. There is the great anarchist William Godwin, whose treasured insight it was that our impulses are the artefacts of society and who didn’t hesitate to carry that insight into the sexual domain. His feminist partner Mary Wollstonecraft applied the same thought to women’s sexual ...”

“... he looked on Gibbon as ‘still our master, above and beyond “date”’, unlike David Hume and William Robertson, who had become classics and were no longer read. Because Gibbon was still a contemporary and an authority, he was not ‘out of date’, and should be consulted and corrected by the historian of late Antiquity, who read him to see where he was ...”

“... A vivid reminder of the cost of that whole struggle to the Anglican Church is contained in Dr William Oddie’s unhelpfully-timed evocation of the Crockford’s Preface affair of two years ago. It is a curious work, in which the first half appears to have no other objective but the placing of Canon Gareth Bennett – the anonymous author of the 1987 ...”

“... successes in these struggles but saw they could not be other than limited. Empson himself told Sir William Haley: ‘I think it really was rather exhilarating for us to feel that we were fighting alone against the forces of evil.’ And for the rest of his life he would arm himself against various opponents who, merely by disagreeing with him, betrayed their ...”

“... folk-and-myth-inspired self-help (Hark delivers talks that invoke Odysseus, Hannibal, William Tell etc), mental archery isn’t exactly a lampoon of any of these practices. It’s silly, and the novel says it’s silly, but it isn’t silly for the novel’s characters. Lipsyte has now written three novels about middle-aged failures (Home Land and ...”

“... from the estate of James Mendez, a Jewish merchant of Portuguese descent. Mendez bought them from William Chapman in 1720, just after the collapse of the South Sea Company, in which Chapman was a shareholder. How and when the paintings arrived in Britain isn’t known, but by the time Mendez got hold of them they had already been identified as Zurbarán’s ...”

“... course Milton is the one responsible for that twisting: he cannot have tolerated the notion that Christian truth requires pagan witnessing, even if he did accept the common view that pagan mythology contained garbled fragments of biblical truth. For the modern reader, such relentless classicism can cause odd problems. As David Daiches once remarked, we are ...”

“... fringe, even if it is less full-bodied than Hezza’s? Johnson’s new job ought perhaps to worry William Hague, who peaked in the hair stakes when he was 16. But why should blondness be important to a serious periodical like the Spectator? In a recent number of the rag (6 January) there’s an article by Big Boris defending ...”

“... array of military ostentation are gold crosses ruthlessly folded, maybe by an enemy of the Christian faith, together with a mysterious gold strip bearing a quotation from Numbers 10.35, which could have been part of the consecration jewellery of some great church of the conversion era. The metal detectors have helped to reveal the existence of a ...”

“... devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.’ William Blake wrote these words near the end of the 18th century and set going the idea that Paradise Lost, Milton’s epic justifying the ways of God to men, had a twofold force: an orthodox ostensible meaning and a profoundly unorthodox unconscious meaning, the ...”

“... stacks, Doug, half-naked and on the run from a mob of siblings, gets directions from his brother William: Take your first right through Minor Elizabethan Drama. Comedies will appear on your left and tragedies will be on your right. Keep going past Ralph Roister Doister and The Spanish Tragedy. About three shelves after Gorboduc, you’ll come to a narrow ...”

“... intentions. Third, that in our time the most prevalent mis-imputation of an intention has been Christian. All six authors are seen in relation to Christianity, though not solely so. The possibilities other than Christianity are then an important part of the rescue-work. Marvell lived in an age when ‘natural magic’ and fairies were respectable, and when ...”

“... through the evangelical sub-culture of America. Their narratives abound with the exploits of Christian stunt women, Christian tee-shirt salesmen, Christian heavy metallists, Christian weight-watchers and ...”

“... the barren fig tree, though it was not the season for figs? Bertrand Russell, in Why I am not a Christian, remarked: In the Gospels, Christ said: ‘Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?’ That was said to people who did not like his preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone. Surely it must be ...”

“... An owl and a scarab are among the images that gesture towards iconographies other than the Christian. Inside, the dream-like sensation of being in a place at once familiar yet oddly re-ordered continues with an architecture that speaks an ancient language with a curiously individual intonation. If its precise meaning is hard to catch, there is no doubt ...”