“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Geronimo Rex – a disorganised redneck version of The Adventures of Augie March – won the William Faulkner Prize and a nomination for the National Book Award when it came out in 1976. His 1978 short-story collection, Airships, was even more successful, winning two prizes, but the increasingly fragmented and sometimes mediocre short novels and story ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... remark had huge consequences when it was vastly elaborated by the antiquary and archaeologist William Stukeley in the 18th century. Druidry took on a life of its own, which continues even though it has been known for more than a century that stone circles long predate the Iron Age, when such scant accounts of the druids as exist were written. Exasperation ...”

“... among the wretched.One way to survive was through internal exile. Thirty years after the war, Christian Schad, so forgotten that he had no reputation to blemish, would exhume himself to become a sucker for Oriental religions and an octogenarian flower child. Schad’s minutely rendered subjects were ...”

“... 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 ...”