“... New Yorker or the Mormon from ‘Taxachusetts’ wins the Republican nomination, fundamentalist Christian leaders have threatened to form a third party. The other frontrunner, Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, is making inroads among his fellow creationists and millennialists, but has deviated from hardline Republican positions on ...”

“... to oust him, most virulently by the Nazis. He stands as the first great Jewish composer, yet was a Christian convert, a practising Lutheran, who quite possibly never entered a synagogue. His grandfather Moses Mendelssohn – who was among Europe’s first significant Jewish philosophers – was a decisive force in the creation of a German cultural environment ...”

“... skill as both a realist and a determined unrealist that he could seemingly invent a strange Christian sect of self-mutilated castrates and a cannibal who takes along a green companion on his journey lest he run short of food along the way, and then reveal in an afterword that such practices were well documented in the Russia of the time – which is ...”

“... by a healer, and to the Spanish the ritual bore a suspicious and confusing resemblance to the Christian Eucharist. According to what survived of the pre-conquest written record, the Nahua believed peyote came from the ‘House of the Sun’, a place the psychoactive plants made it possible to visit.‘It was a bright world of radiant colour,’ Jay ...”

“... association with paganism, with heresy and sorcery, made them a constant object of suspicion in Christian Europe. Condemned as the devil’s agents at witchcraft trials, burnt alongside Protestants by Mary Tudor and alongside Catholics by Elizabeth I, roasted at country fairs and persecuted for sport, cats were often given short shrift in Britain. Ancient ...”

“... and fetch good prices too, chief justices, lords lieutenant, lords mayor, George Moore, Sir William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, Walter Osborne, Jack Yeats, my famous namesake his brother Bill, Padraic Colum, John Millington Synge, young painters like Paddy Tuohy who really did paint old J.S. Joyce and died of his own hand, poor Sean O’Sullivan who died of ...”

“... speak every day for a Britain that is perfectly in love with its cellphone democracy. This is William Cobbett’s country no more, so let us sling a troubled thought among the Christmas books. The sufferings of a celebrity, despite the enjoyments, despite the privilege, are supposed to embody the sufferings of us all. They remind us how we are all the ...”

“... the left-wing Henry Wallace from remaining vice president. ‘Who the hell is Harry Truman?’ William Leahy, Roosevelt’s chief of staff, asked. ‘I hardly know Truman,’ Roosevelt said. ‘He has been over here a few times, but he made no particular impression on me.’ Roosevelt would see Truman only twice during his fourth term, and he kept his vice ...”

“... Enzo Rossi, protesting against the suspension of Jodi Dean, a professor of politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, from her academic duties. In a blog post, Dean – a communist and anti-Zionist – had remarked of the early scenes from 7 October:Who could not feel energised seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the ...”

“... a week before his trip to Seattle, he was wearing a Malcolm X cap and carrying a well-worn copy of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. On 8 July, after a breakfast with the Democratic presidential candidate and former basketball star Bill Bradley, Joe went to Mount Rainier to do some birdwatching. He never returned. The most likely explanation is that ...”

“... Netherlandish town like ’s-Hertogenbosch stormed by Turkish troops. ‘The demonic siege of the Christian self,’ Koerner comments, ‘thus expands to encompass the entire ecumene.’ It continues in the present, and not only in the perceived Muslim threat to Europe, as Koerner details in a bravura reading of Adoration of the Magi (c.1490-1500). In this ...”

“... of behaviour. Henry James met the 36-year-old Peirce in Paris in 1875, and reported to his brother William back in Boston that ‘he is a very good fellow & one must appreciate his mental ability, but he has too little social talent ... too little art of making himself agreeable.’ The extent to which Peirce failed in that most Jamesian of arts is the theme ...”

“... domain of, VI, 483, 721e; exclusion from choir in St. Peter’s, V, 705c; exclusion from Christian priesthood, VI, 662c; exclusion from heaven, I,144-5. See also women, British; women, Muslim    and warfare, II, 29-30, 42, 189c, 189var/c; V,     357-60; VI, 75, 84-5, 537, 564-7; their genital organs as cause of, V, 425-6 ...    as ...”

“... to Les Fleurs du Mal, and places the individual talent of its author in the mainstream of Christian tradition. Both in ‘Epipsychidion’ and in the unfinished ‘Triumph of Life’ Shelley uses the elements of Dante’s poetry to create poetry of a wholly different kind. Shelley couldn’t abide anything in the nature of an orderly and regulated ...”

“... William Blake is surely the locus classicus for human sympathy with other-than-human animals. Anyone who is, as I am, seared by the cruelty and injustice humans inflict on their fellow animals will recognise in Blake his own perceptions expressed with unsurpassed accuracy and poignancy. Blake died a decade before Victoria came to the throne ...”