“... school-prayer flapdoodle. The second reason is that Gingrich himself is not excited by these ‘Christian Coalition’ hysterias. He criticised Jesse Helms the other day, when that ghastly old pervert proposed a cut-off in funding for Aids research on the grounds that homosexuals deserved what they got. He criticised Charles Murray’s notorious tract The ...”

“... from the psychological dimension?’Giorgio Agamben, The End of the PoemThere is a moment​ in William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity when he decides to linger in Macbeth’s mind. The future killer is trying to convince himself that murder might be not so bad a crime (for the criminal) if he could just get it over with. This is about as unreal as a ...”

“... at the outset of his Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes in 1659, the upholding of Christian freedom requires ‘that for belief or practice in religion according to this conscientious persuasion, no man ought to be punished or molested by any outward force on earth whatsoever’. Milton always presents himself as no less hostile to the control ...”

“... of the human herd.’ If you cite this sort of passage from Nietzsche (or similar ones in William James or John Dewey) in order to argue that what we call ‘the search for objective truth’ is not a matter of getting your beliefs to correspond better and better to the way things really are, but of attaining intersubjective agreement, or of ...”

“... outsiders – first Columbus, and then the heroic scientists who opposed Aristotelian and Christian orthodoxy – made progress possible; at the same time, that progress was ‘inevitable’, because the discovery of empirical facts in itself determines their acceptance. But was mainstream, institutional culture really so backward? There are good ...”

“... and insisted that ‘if we are industrious we shall never starve.’ By the mid-19th century, Christian exhortation to good works and the conviction of employers that they had a right to demand long hours of poorly remunerated labour were an almost omnipotent ideological mix. Carlyle announces in Past and Present (1843) that ‘all work, even ...”

“... It started at the ocean with the French, who imagined themselves as the defenders of Christian civilisation against the barbarous denizens of the forests across the Rhine. But then it turns out that the Germans also saw themselves as the front-line defenders of Europe against primitive uncultured Slavs, in particular the untidy, untrustworthy ...”

“... Milk. The authenticity of Florence’s spiritual powers was vouched for by a Victorian scientist, William Crookes, who also became besotted with ‘Katie King’, the spirit whose materialisations were the high point of Florence Cook’s séances. There was no middle ground in the 19th-century Spiritualist debate. Either the voice you heard and the form you ...”

“... a panel on ‘Feminist Criticism Revisited: Where Are We Going? Where Have We Been?’ (Barbara Christian, Florence Howe, Jane Gallop, Nancy Miller, and me) attracted 1800 people, who jammed the aisles to hear that although the women’s movement is in disarray, feminist criticism, while no longer a coherent critical movement, has been fully assimilated ...”

“... study of Gladstone and religion, Parry traces many of the leadership’s beliefs back to their Christian roots. The Whigs, he shows, subscribed to a ‘manly’ Protestantism, free alike from the ‘effeminacy’ of Ritualism and the zealous bigotry of Dissent. At the heart of their creed lay a conception of the Church as a tolerant, all-embracing ...”

“... social death at Magdalene – he never seriously purported to be other than he was. He exhumed his Christian name in post-war politics and made it into a distinctive trademark, whereas to remain Peter would have left him swimming in a pool of Anthonys and Olivers and Harolds and Hughs. It was thought very funny at the time when Bernard Levin in the Spectator ...”

“... is the desired sense of oneness, an experience both intense and releasing, in which Eastern and Christian myths come together. In its attempt to portray Stone’s state of mind, the prose becomes clotted, a mixture of involvement and detachment (for a quirky humour is still at work – the horse of death is less messenger from hell than variety turn, down ...”

“... that he doubted it was indeed the best state? More was a lawyer, yet the Utopians have few laws, a Christian, yet they had no revelation. Should we then agree with Utopia’s discoverer, Raphael Hythlodaeus (the ‘speaker of nonsense’), that ‘there is not a more excellent people or a happier commonwealth anywhere in the whole world,’ or with the figure ...”

“... an Italian restaurant in the Remigiusstrasse in Bonn. Its wonder years were the late Forties, when Christian Democrat politicians, de-Nazified and with certificates in their waistcoat-pockets to prove it, spun webs of intrigue between the padded booths; when the Bundestag still convened among the stuffed animals at the Museum König a hundred yards away; and ...”

“... tribal communities did not place him in a moral vacuum. Muscularity was intrinsic to Ferguson’s Christian vision, the free will of fallen man being an essential component of the divine plan. God had indeed created man turbulent and prone to dissension, albeit with sociable and progressive instincts. Yet, as the final sentence of the Essay concludes, ‘men ...”