“... Saint-Denis, a boy of 12 begins to preach. He has received word from God that it is the mission of Christian children to free the Holy Land from the infidel. He draws crowds, draws followers: boys and girls swarm from street and field. God is their Pied Piper. They march the roads of France, exalted, unstoppable, expecting a miracle at every turn in the ...”

“... equally. The growth of religious fanaticism in Israel must, I think, be connected to retrograde Christian passions in Lebanon, Islamic emotions in Egypt and elsewhere. I am not interested in determining which of the three religions is less tolerant, but it is a historical fact that Israel, founded in 1948, is the first quasi-theocratic state in the Middle ...”

“... and comparative mythography, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Bertrand Russell, J.B.S. Haldane and John Maynard Keynes (for being a renegade Eton-and-King’s man who thought the college needed shaking up). Lytton Strachey returned James’s contempt: ‘It’s odd that the provost of Eton should still be aged 16. A life without a jolt.’ The only modern ...”

“... in God’s eyes. It is equally easy to imagine a subsequent darkening of the plain – the old Christian reverence for simplicity yielding to the carceral project of modernity, Foucault’s great confinement. Go back to the ‘reversible world’ of the late Middle Ages, however, and you will find that real idiots are remarkably absent from inverted ...”

“... Anita Bryant, and a great surge of (horribly popular) homophobia. Anita Bryant was a singer turned Christian crusader, and she and her supporters managed to get gay rights – that is, the rights of gay people to be people like anyone else – repealed in Minnesota, Florida, Kansas and Oregon. As I understand it, this situation does not resemble that of other ...”

“... character, in this case Dick Cheney, to have been, and how far did he oblige?’ Cheney, played by Christian Bale, whose other larger than life roles include Bruce Wayne, Patrick Bateman and Jesus, looms effectively in the film, as he should – nothing is quite so visible in a movie as a supposedly invisible man. Bale is terrific in the part but he is not the ...”

“... to Justin de Villeneuve, Twiggy’s manager (and formerly a Mayfair hairdresser under the name Christian St Forget). On a trip to New York in 1969, Killip was diverted for a second time, by the work of Bill Brandt, Walker Evans, August Sander and Paul Strand.He returned home, worked in his parents’ pub and began documenting a place that was still, via ...”

“... photographs would. Although less obviously so than most of the portraits he is famous for, Maika, Christian Schad’s Holbein-precise portrait of 1929, is a document of life in the bohemian interstices of the city. So are Nan Goldin’s colour photographs of friends in New York and Paris in the 1990s. Kollwitz and Schad interpret; they are telling us ...”

“... the London pictures, paintings from 1618 through to the late 1620s, include religious subjects (St John on Patmos, The Immaculate Conception) and genre pieces (The Water-Seller of Seville, Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary). The genre pictures are lit, it seems, by an afternoon sunlight which penetrates dark rooms, strikes highlights ...”

“... and then rejected by the Japanese government, officially because it was too melancholy and too ‘Christian’, but probably also because it assaults and deconstructs martial patriotism, replacing it (in a gentle, Mahlerian final movement) with a vision of comity and brotherhood. He was the explorer of shifting tonalities, wayward harmonies, creeping ...”

“... out, these concerns are not new. In 1875, less than ten years after the movement was founded, Sir John Strachey, a senior British colonialist, asked his colleague John Palmer to infiltrate the madrasa at Deoband and to report back on what he found there. Having taken a look Palmer concluded: ‘there cannot be a better ...”

“... in October 1529, More, though a layman, was soon the Church’s most eager agent. With the help of John Stokesley, the Bishop of London, he broke into the houses of suspected heretics, arresting them on the spot and sometimes interrogating them in his own home. He imprisoned one man in the porter’s lodge of his house, and had him put in the stocks. He raided ...”

“... while stationed in Afghanistan.The East has overheated the erotic imagination for centuries. Christian travellers often remarked on the Ottoman fondness for catamites, especially among military men. Uluç Ali and Hasan Veneziano – both important 16th-century corsairs, both converts – were said to have quarrelled bitterly over a boy; one Western spy ...”

“... through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to ...”

“... for thirteen pence a day. Yet there is an unmistakable authenticity about Housman’s work. John Bayley starts his explorations by emphasising Housman’s pessimism, and this is not a mere set of ideas: it had grown from a personal disappointment deep into the roots of his mind. The Martyrdom of Man (1872) – Winwood Reade’s reach-me-down history of ...”