“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”