“... 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 (...”

“... movements were appearing in virtually every major religious tradition. In America, the New Christian Right challenged and temporarily checked the steady secularisation of politics. Commenting on the growth of evangelical and fundamentalist churches, Peter Berger, doyen of Weberian theorists, was forced to admit that ‘serious intellectual ...”

“... bull, either, but a scrub belonging to her tenant’s sons. It is not the hardness of Christian realism that prescribes the widow’s undeserved death but the logic of fiction, and there one must leave it, as one also leaves ‘Good Country People’, with a satisfied sense of form but unconvinced (in the case of the latter story) that the ...”

“... only in the South. The government sought to destroy King’s reputation. With the authorisation of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the FBI listened in on his phone calls with close associates and planted informers in his circle. Convinced the civil rights movement was a communist plot, J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men gathered recordings of his trysts with women ...”

“... not a surprise that his first and last LRB pieces were about Christianity. Not because he was a Christian (he wasn’t: ‘a faint absenteeist affection’ for the Church of England was all he could muster), but in part at least because he loved stories, in particular stories that came with many variations and inconsistencies, biblical stories. ‘The charm ...”

“... to fit into the timeframe defined by a single year. History rarely can. That is the problem with Christian Caryl’s fascinating and frustrating book, which identifies 1979 as the year that gave birth to the 21st century. Caryl builds his case around five overlapping stories, four about individuals and one about a country. The people are Thatcher, Deng ...”

“... saviour who comes in person to pay off Rosewell and lead them out of indentured servitude is Elder John Bennett: tall, hale, in his thirties – all paternal benevolence and capable masculinity. When Harley and his brother Pence first meet him, they are helping in the hog abattoir. The animals are lowered into barrels of almost boiling water to be scalded for ...”

“... work. Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 incorporate passages of literary and art criticism (on John Ashbery’s poems, or Christian Marclay’s film The Clock) into their narratives, some of it taken almost verbatim from Lerner’s own published essays. It’s a remarkable thing to create a narrator who can credibly ...”

“... of Europe’s Jews. Many more Palestinians were killed by the Jordanian Army and Lebanon’s Christian militias than by the Israelis at Deir Yassin. In August 1976, at the Tel el-Za’atar refugee camp in Beirut, Christian militias put to death between two and three thousand Palestinians. They completed the butchery ...”

“... The basic answer offered to the unstated second question is: ‘Living as we do in an originally Christian culture, we see ourselves as a mixture of flesh and spirit.’ The word ‘mixture’ can be unpacked in various ways, as we gradually learn. Porter, who knows all about 18th-century medicine, naturally chooses to lay his emphasis on the part played in ...”

“... Splendid​ specimens of the untrousered, strong-legged Celt’. That was what John Stuart Blackie, the founder of Scotland’s first chair of Celtic studies in 1882, liked to see about him in the Highlands. In Celts: Art and Identity (at the British Museum until 31 January, then at the National Museum of Scotland from 30 March until 25 September) he would have met several untrousered, strong-legged giants ...”

“... the taxi-driver – who else? – of the death of the American Ambassador. It was August 1968, and John Gordon Mein had been assassinated that morning. This was an abrupt introduction to the complexities of Guatemalan politics, and I merely assumed – with the Vietnam War and the less-publicised Guatemalan guerrilla war of the Sixties well underway – that ...”

“... to witnessing one was to spit, to avoid contamination. In Europe, from the beginning of the Christian era up to the Renaissance, the condition was usually considered a sign of demonic possession, black magic or witchcraft. At best, it was evidence of a wicked character. (Kent to Oswald in King Lear: ‘A plague upon your epileptic visage!’) But there ...”

“... European writers taught that witches formed a spiritual union with Satan, thus perverting the Christian covenant, whereas common people (mostly in England) held the more grossly materialist belief that the satanic pact was sealed by suckling animal-shaped familiars. In New Guinea the Hewa tribe once supposed witches had a flesh-craving foetus nesting ...”