“... dated to between 1066 and 1100, and more to the anarchy after 1135. Looking back on the 1140s, William of Malmesbury would write that ‘castles multiplied throughout England, each defending its own space, or indeed, to say it more truthfully, plundering it.’ Henry II Plantagenet made his first act in England the destruction of all the castles he could ...”

“... detective’s talent for noticing the deceptiveness of the taken-for-granted in his defences of Christian belief in a secular world. Some people began to wonder if there were something saintly about him.After his death in 1936, Chesterton was neglected by English departments more interested in The Waste Land than in rollicking ballads of the English ...”

“... 1931 and the death of Alfred Perceval. As Richard Perceval Graves remarks, John was ‘a devout Christian, a loving father, and a most honourable, unselfish man’. The difficulties begin here. This author, who has written accounts of the lives of T.E. Lawrence, Housman and the Powys brothers, closely resembles his father. But Robert Graves did not at all ...”

“... essays. Observations of the gardens at Chatsworth, culled from a forgotten book by the antiquarian William Stukeley and an unpublished diary by Sir John Percival, make possible a significant contribution to the debate about the models for Timon’s villa in the Epistle to Burlington. Patient research into Chancery records yields an amusing note on ‘The Case ...”

“... should be excluded from schools. Intolerance is institutionalised; it is the ordinary language of Christian fundamentalists, and fundamentalists are the human infrastructure of the southern United States. Or so it seems at first blush. Tennessee is a small state with an ignominious past. In 1860, one quarter of its population were slaves and the slave-trade ...”

“... his unsuccessful father feature regularly in Trumbo’s fiction.) His mother was a strong-minded Christian Scientist, the daughter of a famous sheriff and tracker. Trumbo Snr lost his job at Benge’s and fell terminally ill in 1925; the family moved to Los Angeles and young Dalton – neighbours remembered a ‘busy-assed guy, wound up like an eight-day ...”

“... the European force on whose bayonets British rule in the last resort depended. In the 1830s Lord William Bentinck’s economy-conscious administration and a more censorious European opinion stirred by Evangelical religion led to the discontinuance of many lock hospitals and to an attack on what Bishop Daniel Wilson called the ‘licensed brothels’ which ...”

“... after he had published the base text for his notion of a philosophy of Christ, the Manual of a Christian Soldier), gave it a new dimension along with increased circulation. The way to a reform of religion and morals, he was clear, was imitation of the manners and customs of the primitive church, where all was simplicity and sincerity, not pomposity and ...”

“... the end of Gould’s Cambridge period, in 1964, Eduardo Frei won the Presidential election for the Christian Democrats in Chile: this decent, respectable election was too boring for Huneeus, who had supported the left-wing Salvador Allende. Huneeus wrote to Gould: ‘Our candidate lost, as you may have learnt in one of your few moments of ...”

“... fortifies my soul to know/That, though I perish, Truth is so.’ You must feel uneasy at William James’s claim that ‘ideas ... become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience.’ You must become indignant when Ryan (accurately paraphrasing Dewey) says that ‘to call a statement ...”

“... he dealt with an application for permission to appeal against a finding that the dismissal of a Christian relationship counsellor for refusing to help same-sex couples did not constitute religious discrimination. The application included a request that a special court should sit to hear the appeal, consisting of judges with ‘a proven sensitivity and ...”

“... which can’t be divided evenly by seven. In both, the Sun yields to the Moon at the climax of the Christian year. Easter occurs on the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon. But the lunar month and year are no more divisible by seven than the solar year. The seven days of Creation, on the last of which God rested, were not a clear model for ...”

“... of 1688 but the Reformation. The medieval Catholic Church had been truly and beautifully Christian, but by the late 15th century it was rotten. It had transformed the religion of Christ into the Christian religion and this was destroying the idyll of merry England. Turpitude was rife behind a thicket of ...”

“... the 19th century’s certainties – primary among them Western universalism, the old Jewish-Christian claim to be able to create a life of universal validity now transposed into secular millenarianism – had been undermined by historical calamities and blistering critiques from across the ideological spectrum. Lévi-Strauss and Sartre both concluded ...”

“... Socialist and Communist Parties, social democrats and a leftist faction that had split from the Christian Democrats, he had more than a million. The alliance was called Popular Unity, echoing the earlier Popular Front, but Allende made it clear that what Chileans meant by democracy had changed since the 1930s: ‘We do not want a repetition of the Popular ...”