“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... weak a term for this stranglehold on the mike. It is more like a willed act of occult possession: William Blake becoming Milton so that he can recompose the older poet’s faults. Home, over-age, is an envenomed revenger, fast as flame, burning up the feeble avatars of Allen’s formulaic prose – letting the ghosts through, the instigators of riot.Single ...”

“... such as Belgravia and St James’s Magazine, spawned by John Maxwell, or the vulgar publisher William Tinsley’s Tinsley’s Magazine, in which Thomas Hardy had his first success with the serial of A Pair of Blue Eyes. (Houghton’s explanation for not indexing these three journals is revealing: ‘they consist primarily of fiction, and fiction seems ...”

“... to be considered a star in the society of Meriton; that the ‘considerable sum’ Mrs Norris gave William Price was one pound; that Mr Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage, and kept her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years; and that the letters placed by Frank Churchill before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained ...”

“... original nucleus of the National Gallery. (These rarely reach the esoteric level of ‘Brigadier William Draper, the only senior British soldier to have been a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge’.) As far as the local colouring of the period is concerned, Hugh Thomas does perhaps on occasions fall into the fault of that other protagonist of ...”