“... 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 ...”

“... of Oxford University. Above all, there is a chasm between Gladstone’s all-encompassing Christian theodicy and Jenkins’s secular, sceptical, post-Freudian outlook. Yet many of their common experiences and career parallels amount to more than trivial coincidences. They testify to affinities which help inform Jenkins’s Gladstone with sustained ...”

“... years or so, was that. In 1915, the year of Griffith’s film, the Klan was refounded, by one William Simmons, an ex-minister and ‘promoter of fraternal societies’, but this time its ambitions and influence spread far beyond the South. The original white supremacist and Southern-based agenda became the blueprint for a nationwide campaign of moral ...”

“... too. Certainly Jews and Catholics faced a common threat, for if Jews were believed to have any Christian credentials, those credentials were Catholic ones. The small and secret Jewish community, whose existence was revealed to the public by Menasseh ben Israel’s campaign, worshipped at the Spanish Embassy – and in 1655 England and Spain were at ...”

“... than life and less than living, for whom no punishment is too dreadful. ‘So it is that the good Christian projects his defects into the good Jew.’ So it was that ‘in the last years before the war’ – the First War – ‘one of the most magnificent and popular means of satisfying this queer need’ for a displeasure-image ‘was Prussian ...”

“... that is, it was (English) national rather than merely metropolitan – imbued with the spirit of William Morris, enthusiastic for the new idea of a decentralising, anti-statist, bottom-up Guild Socialism. Ironically, various New Age luminaries, notably G.D.H. Cole, became some of the Statesman’s most prolific and influential contributors. Indeed the New ...”

“... strategic and maritime benefits conferred on the empire by the Caribbean. The radical journalist William Cobbett, a rather unexpected ally of the slaveholders, believed that the planters ‘ought to be scrupulously attended to, as if they were farmers in Cornwall or in Yorkshire’ and were ‘entitled to the same protection in their persons and fortunes, as ...”

“... and focusing the discontent of the country at large. In this they were immensely successful. Soon William Cobbett was writing Caroline’s propaganda and she was receiving numerous ‘addresses’ or petitions of support from the ‘loyal voices of Suffolk’, the people of Sunderland and many more. To Sunderland she – or rather Cobbett – replied that ...”

“... Also like his namesake, Dave is a verbal genius. Reading Self is often reminiscent not of William Burroughs, as Self himself might wish, or of J.G. Ballard, whom Self obviously admires and seeks to emulate (clear echoes in The Book of Dave of The Drowned World), but rather of Norman Mailer, particularly the vainglorious, dick-swinging Mailer of ‘The ...”

“... diseases. ‘Know syphilis . . . and all things clinical will be added unto you,’ the great Sir William Osler had said. But it was vital to get things right. Drugs were available, but they were dangerous and expensive. In the untreated, symptoms could disappear quickly, as the organism went to ground, only to re-emerge randomly and unpredictably decades ...”

“... for medieval culture. (Readers who prefer modern English can consult the excellent translation by William Granger Ryan, published by Princeton in 1993.) Pious instruction, sensational entertainment, conservative propaganda, erotic titillation, sacred violence – the Golden Legend offered all these and more. Most obviously, it offered a way to hallow ...”