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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... relish a more precise kind of resolution, since it accommodates conflicting realities, pagan and Christian, within a single order. It is written by a Christian poet about the pre-Christian past of his people, and thus combines historical detachment and imaginative inwardness. Like Heaney ...”

“... his style. Cambridge added to the mix the sense of Britain’s manifest destiny entertained by Sir John Seeley and his followers and William Cunningham’s brand of Christian Conservatism. The discussion of Baldwin’s youth is professedly intended by Williamson to exhibit a ‘model of how examination of an interwar ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... boasts of being ‘admired of those that hate [him] most’. ‘A sicke Machiavell Pollititian,’ John Stephens wrote in his Essays of 1615, ‘is a baked meate for the devill.’ No other political theorist has received remotely similar treatment. Hobbes, who came in for a handsome share of vilification from the 1650s, was namechecked as an early exponent of ...”

“... The Rebel Angels, William Golding’s The Paper Men, Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot, and John Updike’s Hugging the Shore. There are also essays on Ring Lardner, on D.H. Lawrence, and on Structuralism, which Lodge as late as 1980 regarded as ‘the most significant intellectual movement of our time’. Such a collection is bound to be of uneven ...”

“... and Antonine principate. The 15th and 16th chapters, which conclude the volume with a survey of Christian history before the victory of Constantine, instantly occasioned a fierce controversy over Gibbon’s evident unbelief and his use of irony to convey it, so that his writings on the history of the Church have been viewed through the glass of this ...”

“... paying a price for it in the form of global warming, acid rain and so forth. Over a century ago, John Ruskin was arguing that Cartesian (‘modern’) thought had destroyed man’s reverence and wonder in the face of the external world, and that the death of God-in-nature would eventually bring the end of nature. Gore’s book is squarely in this ...”