“... and nationalism, was ended by the Crimean War, and Russia was further angered by the sight of two Christian powers fighting alongside a Muslim ally. Lingering Russian resentment was one cause of the disruption of international relations and the destabilisation in the Balkans that ultimately led to the Great War. And the participation of the greatest Muslim ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... William Golding’s new novel, Fire Down Below is the third volume of a trilogy, the other parts being Rites of Passage and Close Quarters. The trilogy is about a voyage to Sydney in 1813, and a bald, merely literal account might run like this ... On the first page the hero appears, Edmund FitzHenry Talbot, an unformed young man of good family who is going out to help govern New South Wales in an aged line-of-battle ship, Captain Anderson commander, and who has been given a book in which to record his journey by his godfather, an influential peer ...”

“... National Gallery, its rooms stocked with Berenson’s acquisitions, carrying Ferguson’s Guide to Christian Signs and Symbols rather than the once ubiquitous Italian Painters of the Renaissance. Similarly, Berenson’s canvas-tapping, idiom-hunting methods of attribution and authentication have been superseded by the less intuitive but more scientific ...”

“... all going to die anyway. This is a weirdly literal-minded reading of the line, especially for a Christian, which is what Auden was by 1944; surely it refers to death-in-life, to other ways of being dead than the mere biological one? (We must love one another, or it will be as if we never lived.) Dropping a line from your official oeuvre, however, is not the ...”

“... Their way of life reached its peak between the 10th and 12th centuries, as reckoned by the Christian calendar. From the ruins they left behind, it is clear that they were remarkable architects and engineers. Among their most celebrated achievements are the so-called Great Houses, large edifices erected from blocks of sandstone and sometimes reaching ...”

“... strange and dangerous for the journalists themselves – are less interesting on the page. Christian Parenti, the Nation correspondent, also spent time with other journalists at the press briefings and at the Palestine Hotel. But he portrays himself as an outsider, and his alternative agenda has resulted in one of the most revealing accounts of a ...”

“... not her real forename; ‘Crafts’ may be a tribute to Ellen Crafts, who with her husband, William, made a daring escape from slavery in 1848 disguised as a white male. Whoever ‘Hannah’ was, she lives now in the pages of her book, and we need to look within the text to find out who and what she was: and since it has many autobiographical ...”

“... connections, Bute was decried as the new Highland adventurer. It did not help that another Scot, William Murray, Lord Mansfield, who was dogged by the smear that he was intent on importing Scots Romanist principles into the English common law, had become lord chief justice in 1756. Might Bute and his Scotch cronies find no better use for Magna Carta, English ...”

“... remotely like that of the man with the tonsure? But brilliant, knowing … And more deeply Christian (if that’s what one wanted, and surely one did) than even dear Bouts. More compassionate and ironic about our exit from original sin. More modern in its picture of sanctity.Bosch​ – speaking now to the heart of his work, to the people in the ...”

“... savage tribes, like those elsewhere in the British Empire, needed the clarifying light of Christian missionaries or exposure to scientific reason.The maps were imaginative artefacts as much as scientific documents. In the new folio they have been ‘re-curated’, as the cover blurb puts it, with just a hint of the coffee-table book. The maps are ...”

“... of the title derives from Berryman’s witty Englishing of his name to Aldous Huxley, from William Bradford to W.H. Auden, have discovered in America an unformulated open space hospitably ready to accommodate their private myths of self-realisation. To less determined or less visionary immigrants it offers a wide variety of ready-made life-styles, and ...”

“... approach to a personal credo that his honesty and confusion of mind would permit: ‘I choose the Christian’s way (and completely fail to live up to it) because I believe it true and because I believe – for possibly a split second in six months but that’s enough – that Christ is really the incarnate son of God and that Sacraments are a means of grace ...”

“... did this modus operandi become that no one seems to have noticed that without a sense of the Christian goal/socialist heaven such thinking is intrinsically oppositional. Not only is it happier in opposition than in power, but it tends to the view that power and the holding of it are intrinsically bad things: Acton’s aphorism about all power corrupting ...”

“... about animal rights, the purity of hunting and the wide open spaces. Indeed he does resemble, as William Burroughs once wrote of his own visage, ‘one of them sheep-killing dogs’. He and his kind hate the cities and the city-dwellers, especially those cities that have become sinks of immigration and race-mixing and alien religions.Clinton’s second ...”