“... not a soul emerges out of inner darkness This can barely calibrate the relations implied between Christian belief, a point of hesitation, ageing, the soul. Such scant articulation is cultivated, though, by a poet refusing to diminish life’s inwovenness. A geography of decline provides the setting for Part One. Buckled asphalt along neglected roads, rank ...”

“... and wondrous happenings from natural disasters to sea monster sightings. In London in the 1580s, John Wolfe, a printer trained in Florence, pumped out slim translations of Continental news. Newspapers weren’t needed for news from the Battle of Lepanto to cascade across Europe in 1571, with three hundred pamphlets and broadsides printed from Naples to ...”

“... of inserimento, tried to present the movement as a legitimate partner for other parties. The Christian Democrats, who were in government continuously from 1948 until the early 1990s, relied on its support only once, in 1960, prompting widespread protests that forced the resignation of the prime minister, Fernando Tambroni. The postwar anti-fascist ...”

“... the Arab nation-states of the classical anti-semitic rhetoric that has so consistently fouled Christian civilisation. The quotations Lewis has retrieved from journals of standing, indeed from writers who lay claim to respectability, make chilling reading. They depress our estimate of human nature. Semites and Anti-Semites is subtitled ‘An Inquiry into ...”

“... sleeping wives – ‘most irregular, uncleanly, contrary to the strict Islamic custom’. Strict Christian custom, likewise, is defied by Kenneth Toomey in his ‘arresting opening’ to Earthly Powers: ‘It was the afternoon of my 81st birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me ... ’ And ...”

“... same may well have been true of the cities founded or developed by the Swedes in Russia. Was Sir John Hawkins a merchant or a buccaneer? Did his commerce bring benefits to West Africa? Finally, each of these books follows Sawyer’s lead in regarding Viking desecrations as more an unfortunate by-product than a deliberate purpose of their activities. We are ...”

“... is now in the library founded by a rather more public-spirited buccaneer of book collecting, John Pierpont Morgan). Paul Meyer’s career was a model of all that is best in academic rigour; he later helped analyse the documents which led to the acquittal of Alfred Dreyfus. The History of William Marshal contains nearly twenty thousand lines of ...”

“... of how a degree-less provincial could match university-educated courtly playwrights such as John Lyly at their own game. The other writer, however, dealt with French current affairs and the social position of education in a different manner: GUISE: My Lord of Anjou, there are a hundred Protestants Which we have chased into the river Seine That swim ...”

“... pleasant opportunity to tell people twice their age what to do. At the time when the undergraduate John Henry Newman was delighting in the inexhaustible metaphorical riches of Aeschylus at Oxford, the students of Maynooth were being fed a philistine diet of papist apologetics and garbled chunks of scholasticism. It was well nigh impossible, given this dismal ...”

“... The dust jacket of the final volume of Bevis Hillier’s epic life of John Betjeman shows the poet laureate seized by giggles. In this lengthy coda to Hillier’s authorised biography Betjeman appears in many lights, but he’s rarely carefree. ‘Nothing frightens me more than the thought of dying,’ he told a friend in 1958 ...”

“... that so riled darker souls like Baudelaire, and of her belief that socialism was essentially a Christian idea, as people would have been better able to grasp had the Church not long ago sold out to Napoleon and allowed the gospel simplicities that it should have been preaching to become smothered by its close association with one unchristian regime after ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... significance in the tiniest particle and the most obscure event. To writers with an aestheticised Christian sensibility, like Stainer, such reassuring and inspiring theories offer many metaphorical possibilities. While it is good to be reminded that everything is in some way significant, one would like to remind Stainer that everything is not as significant ...”

“... he looked at, Lorck looked at in a peculiar way. One bundle of drawings, which the diarist John Evelyn owned, was split up and sold at auction in 1966 – the compilers of this catalogue have been advertising rather forlornly in the art trade press for news of their whereabouts. The catalogue is Fischer’s life’s work. Many have worried about what ...”

“... shifts take place. He does refer to one theological factor of some historical importance. John Cotton, who left England for New England in 1633, was an experimental predestinarian on this side of the Atlantic who slipped into something very like antinomianism in America. He did so by reviving Calvin. Assurance is the essence of saving faith, and faith ...”