“... and a congregation that includes Geri Halliwell, Bear Grylls, the former John Lewis chair Sharon White and the multi-millionaire Conservative donor Ken Costa.HTB’s approach is rooted less in exegesis than in religious conviction. ‘Enthusiasm is a big part of it,’ according to the writer Andrew Graystone. ‘You believe that your brand of Christianity ...”

“... felt great regret.Parrots are a recurring feature of early European voyages to the Americas. When Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean, he didn’t spot any livestock – ‘neither sheep nor goats nor any other beast’ – but he did see wild parrots and was given some tame ones as a gift. Shortly afterwards, during his first journey along coastal ...”

“... probably something a bit ridiculous in these privileged laments – oh, sing ’dem Harvard blues, white boy! But I am trying to describe some kind of loss, some kind of falling away. (The gain is obvious enough and thus less interesting to analyse.) I asked Christopher Hitchens, long before he was terminally ill, where he ...”

“... had more or less impermeable walls and its contents were more or less homogeneous. Christopher Hann, discussing what he called the ‘Malinowski period’ of early field anthropology, in Social Anthropology (one of the volumes in the Teach Yourself series), underlined the emphasis laid by Malinowski and his disciples and students on the ...”

“... nor does it parade a ready-made metaphysic of gloom, like the novels of Graham Greene and Patrick White. It is not apocalyptic but dreadfully and intently domestic, like Dickens’s world of Todgers. It is divided into three parts: ‘A Head without a World’, ‘Headless World’ and ‘The World in the Head’. Kien, the hero, a recluse and a distinguished ...”

“... book’s bitterly ironic title distils her feelings about this period of inaction. It was Warren Christopher who called genocide ‘a problem from hell’, implying basically that butchery in the Balkans was a public relations fiasco for the Administration. Cynically or not, the West sat on its hands, refusing to undertake even relatively costless ...”

“... think of the Opera House as a superb example of Goethe’s frozen music; others imagine a beached white whale, a galleon sailing off to Elfland, nine ears cocked to hear some heavenly aria, nine nuns playing football. ‘A bunch of toenails clipped from a large albino dog’, the Sydney journalist Ron Saw once wrote. ‘It looks like something that crawled up ...”

“... ma’am.’‘Sir, you’re doing well. These are all good things.’Next was a teenager in a white leather jacket, accompanied by his attorney. He’d missed an appearance the previous week. ‘He was feeling very unsafe living with his father, so he moved to his mother, then contacted me to say he could come in, but –’‘I appreciate you may be ...”

“... he says of Byron; and of Dickinson, no less winningly: ‘She was reclusive, tended to wear white clothing, which was thought odd, and scarcely left her bedroom in her later years.’ Such things strike a whimsical note, but usually Carey’s humour has a flintier edge. It is, for example, difficult to miss the disdain in a description of Stephen ...”

“... discovery of the Romantic poets continues to be made. What Coleridge put in a notebook – the white dung of a hawk falling from the sky, the shadows cast on urine by candlelight – could and can go into poetry, along with the wasp trying to get out of the window, a menstrual problem, buying veal, what a husband thought the wife said, what she felt he ...”

“... to the unconverted, a more specialised activity, goes by a different name: missionary work. Christopher Isherwood harboured a certain amount of rancour towards the majority, but disciplined himself for the missionary purposes of A Single Man, where his mouthpiece George is in mourning for a dead lover, and so benefits from the status of honorary ...”

“... head. Most of us know of Marmaduke Pickthall, for example, only as someone who collaborated with Christopher Isherwood in the translation of the Upanishads. But Humphries has read all the works of Marmaduke Pickthall. As so often happens with the Australian expatriates, however, Humphries discovered his Europe before he got there. When an undergraduate in ...”

“... proud; children read Moroccan-leather books in the flowering field! Alas, He, like a thousand white angels dividing on the road, flees to the mountain! She, perfectly cold, and black, gives chase. ‘Memory’ is an extensive poem opening up large tracts of grazing far from the designated sites of family business, before ending at the bottom of a ...”

“... led him in the eyes of many to betray his left-wing views altogether. Such, no doubt, is how Christopher Hitchens will be remembered. The resemblances to George Orwell, on whom Hitchens has written so admiringly,* are obvious enough, though so are some key differences. Orwell was a kind of literary proletarian who lived in dire straits for most of his ...”

“... in which a woman realises that her light-skinned nephew has thrown in his lot with the white world, the proof being that he has had his hair straightened. She must carry the bad news back to his mother.) In the narrator’s stylisation there is observation as well as projection: Millicent had ‘examined my body in detail, marvelling at its ...”