“... 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 ...”

“... point, in received accounts of the word, a villain is wheeled on: the German psychiatrist Johann Christian Heinroth (1773-1843). Heinroth is a complex and disturbing figure in the history of psychiatry. He was influenced by Christian pietism, idealist philosophy, particularly that of Schelling, the work of ...”

“... where the expressive word, spoken or written, still seemed paramount – beneficiaries of what John Bayley once called “the inevitable solace that right language brings”. We were all, in varying degrees, sociable yet solitary.’It was a bold assertion. She was not only young, and relatively unproven, but the wrong gender; she was pushed right up ...”

“... as a reaction to various problems.’ Some SS reports refer to Jews as ‘useless mouths’ and Christian Gerlach, in his pathbreaking work on Nazi food allocation, has concluded that the Holocaust was a part of ‘starvation policy’: a ‘means’ of managing broader economic interests. Götz Aly and Susanne Heim have been struck by concerns about ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by Herodotus and Pliny, whose existence, apparently validated by the traveller’s tales of John Mandeville, haunted the medieval imagination, including that of Columbus? If they were in fact rational human beings, in the full sense of these words, why had they never heard of the Christian gospel, which, it was ...”