“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the daily exchanges of life Britain is now very like North America or Australia: ubiquity of the Christian name, casualness of dress, universal ignorance of social forms once thought essential; opposition leaders who wander around in shorts and T-shirts and pretend they never went to Eton. Tony Blair is the political personification of a democracy of manner ...”

“... is very good at describing what we all see, but that his way of looking is suffused with a long Christian tradition of holy paradox. His love of the ambiguous and multivalent word (‘And glowery is a mighty word with two meanings/if you crave ambiguity in plain speaking/as I do’) has as its tonal correlative an attraction towards rhetorical tropes and ...”