“... helps to restore to Stevie Smith her dignity. Her earlier biographers, Professors Jack Barbera and William McBrien (who also compiled the uncollected writings under the nauseating title Me Again), for all their hard work and evident devotion, too often failed in their tone, by turns solemn and arch: a combination of a perhaps mimetic sort to which writing ...”

“... some liberal illusions about Abyssinia. Perhaps there was something to be said, on the occasion of William Wilberforce’s centenary, for desimplifying some popular notions about slavery. But Waugh simply cannot look at things soberly: he does not offer a fuller view but replaces one stupid prejudice by a stupider one, preferably in a manner which he hopes ...”

“... with one contemporary form of that bigotry which the doctrine of election has spawned throughout Christian history. But what exercises him is that Jewish belief in election has been the prime cause of anti-semitism. All the brutal intolerance of which the Gentile world is today pathologically ashamed was but the return to roost of fledglings hatched in the ...”

“... he recounted in 1874 how, on the occasion of an accident that had put him in fear of death, ‘the Christian revealed religion had never seemed so little worthy of belief.’ When A.C. Benson asked him what he believed he answered: ‘Nothing supernatural, thank God!’ This last is a witticism of sorts, but it appears to have been not preponderantly by wit ...”

“... a powerful political movement, claiming that the founders intended the United States to be a ‘Christian nation’, seeks to tear down what Jefferson called the ‘wall of separation’ between church and state enshrined in the First Amendment. Certainly, most Americans in 1787 were Christians (although few seem to have attended church regularly). For ...”

“... Whitman (‘the revolt of the Bohemian temperament, with its poetry of crude naturalism’), and William James (‘an impassioned empiricism ... declaring the universe to be wild and young’). The Californian ‘humorists’ referred to by Santayana were the product, primarily, of a distinct historical phenomenon – the mining towns which sprang up during ...”

“... worth laying down one’s life for two brothers or four cousins. This insight was formalised by William Hamilton in Oxford in the Sixties under the name of ‘kin selection’. If seemingly self-sacrificial behaviour disproportionately benefits one’s genetic kin, it once again becomes worthwhile in narrow genetic terms. In Wilson’s hands, Hamilton’s ...”

“... her stepmother, how she ‘rarely’ had her father to herself. When she became a fundamentalist Christian in her teens, she found a family to which she could belong as she hadn’t belonged before; and ‘a father figure to end all father figures’. When she became a bulimic at the end of her teens, she knew she was vomiting up bad feelings about her ...”

“... and as soon as the grave closed over him, he was grossly calumniated. Such was the state of Christian feeling at the beginning of the present century; we may at least hope that nothing of the kind now prevails.’ The hope was vain. When Darwin’s biography was printed it lacked all but the most rudimentary expressions of Enlightened doctrine. Now ...”

“... cares about it at all. What is certain is that he reaffirms the support of his fundamentalist Christian base when he attacks enemies of the Lord on ideological-theological grounds. In this struggle, evolution is seen as the fortress protecting relativism, liberalism and atheism. Take it down, and they will wilt. The president’s base demands unwavering ...”

“... dazzlingly witty drawings. They recall the great 19th-century champion of the true principles of Christian architecture, Augustus Welby Pugin, though they are rendered with the calligraphic style of Barbar the Elephant and in a format that owes quite a bit to Le Corbusier’s polemical tract Vers une architecture. Things that Krier and Le Corbusier ...”

“... In 1828 Macaulay identified the press as ‘a Fourth Estate of the Realm’; by the 1850s, when William Russell was reporting from the Crimea for the Times and his editor, John Delane, was fulminating against the mismanagement of the war, nobody could argue with it. ‘This country is ruled by the Times,’ the Saturday Review declared. ‘We all know ...”

“... it featured comic clerics), the satire ceased to offend – which meant, as the Victorian critic William Archer pointed out, that it ceased to be satire. In fact, it was a sort of apotheosis. Gilbert’s caricatures made W.H. Smith, Sir Garnet Wolseley and Oscar Wilde popular celebrities. Wolseley was so tickled by being portrayed as Major-General Stanley in ...”

“... too politically self-conscious – the map at the back of Absalom, Absalom is clearly marked: ‘William Faulkner, Sole Owner and Proprietor’. But if a writer is not in some strong sense a coloniser, he risks being only a better informed, more alert tourist, and Rush’s Botswana has increasingly become an exotic stage set rather than a distinctive place ...”

“... faith beyond reason. That is, of course, an important insight, and needs re-emphasising, even if Christian theology has always said exactly that. But there is also a good admixture of the banal in the details of Atran’s observations. Plus a tendency to make modules and general ideas seem more substantive by naming them in small capital letters: ‘The ...”