“... like Cary Grant, attuned to someone else’s craziness. This is why it is so satisfying that Christian Bale, as Michael J. Burry, is central to the story. He has a glass eye because a childhood illness deprived him of his natural one, and likes to sit in his office and play the drums, write emails, and sift data as if he were a housebound Sherlock Holmes ...”

“... the mesmerising, litany-like repetitions. The murals were described by Théophile Gautier as a Christian Panathenaea; they could also be compared to medieval plainchant.Flandrin’s friezes must influence in subtle ways those for whom they are only background music. For those of us who choose to concentrate on them, the names of more than half of the ...”

“... tried to browbeat Cony into submission, then threw him in prison. Cony’s lawyer, the eminent Sir John Maynard, demanded that he be set free, and the judges in the case were minded to release him, invoking the provisions of Magna Carta against imprisonment without trial. The Great Oliver then committed Maynard to the Tower, summoned the judges and told them ...”

“... the 1960s and 1970s, in books like Geoffrey Ashe’s The Quest for Arthur’s Britain (1968) and John Morris’s The Age of Arthur (1973). Professional historians have long been embarrassed by the whole thing, but the image created – Roman cavalry leader rallies the British after the Roman army withdrawal and fights off hordes of invading Angles and Saxons ...”

“... attention. The most notorious rake of his age spent the last few months of life in discussion of Christian doctrine. A poet who could not have been more urban in outlook lay dying in the depths of Oxfordshire; he had once said that he could behave only in the country, and that when he got as far as Brentford on his return to town, ‘the devill entred into ...”

“... the recording had been a rush job for George, occupying four days between two singing dates with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers. Edward asked him to undertake the job because they had both been collectors of Surrealism. Edward had been a collector of Dali and Magritte on a scale that can be called patronage; George made a faultless selection of Magrittes from ...”

“... took it for granted that the Koran was not the word of God, and therefore hunted for Jewish and Christian influences. They also discovered Syriac and Greek loan words in the text. They read it looking for insights into the mind of Muhammad. Although Weil, Nöldeke and most of the Orientalists who came after them assumed the Koran to be a purely human ...”

“... room where the soldiers were incarcerated became known – was written by one of the survivors, John Zephania Holwell, and stressed that the nawab had given his word that ‘no harm should come to us’: the deaths, Holwell said, were the ‘result of revenge and resentment’ on the part of the guards. Later accounts, however, claimed that Siraj was ...”

“... camp personnel, Gestapo and police, or participants in the ‘euthanasia’ programme). No wonder John McCloy, the generally patient American High Commissioner, complained about the ‘abysmal ignorance’ displayed by many who wrote to him. Frei brings out very well the pathos that attached to incarcerated former members of the Wehrmacht, and the ...”

“... the horror. No sooner had Scotland failed to qualify than I was moved to treat my friends to John Steinbeck’s comment to Jacqueline Kennedy: ‘You talked of Scotland as a lost cause,’ he said, ‘and that is not true. Scotland is an unwon cause.’ Bloody hell. Better make mine a double. Five minutes later I was thinking about Ireland and five ...”

“... and married, despite considerable opposition, the heir apparent. But though Evita may have used Christian symbolism in the formation of her public image – the stories of Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary especially – she did not interfere in doctrinal matters. Theodora, on the other hand, took a great interest in ...”

“... to Nietzsche at several places in this book, and oftener still to another 19th-century fulminator, John Ruskin. The Veronese essay concludes by hailing the pair as ‘necessary madmen’. Imagine an authorial stance that straddles the two: one that tilts here towards the impassioned granularity of Ruskin’s picture-examining and there towards the swingeing ...”

“... the grotesque links forged by zealots between animals and Jews, those other ‘others’ in Christian Europe), to the development of pet-keeping at home, pet-killing in contemporary animal shelters, and attitudes towards wildlife among today’s industrial nations. This last contribution upsets some national stereotypes and confirms others: Germans have ...”

“... for culture, was chair of the Committees on Standards and Privileges. He has written an account of Christian Socialism, biographies of Stafford Cripps and – strange conjunction – Glenda Jackson, a two-volume ‘biography’ of Parliament, a critique of the British aristocracy, a history of ten gay MPs who opposed appeasement and, only last year, a book ...”