“... what they liked in Lebanon. I ask with a touch of acrimony why we ever left ‘the middle’ and ring off. On the plane, I read Auden and MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland, which first appeared in 1937. Very funny in places, and Auden’s verse ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ is a triumph, though not in the same league as the great man ...”

“... on the wall of his heroine’s bedroom in Pauline at the Beach, to pick out the red of a rubber ring. By comparison, the headless, limbless YSL mannequin, fixed to a plinth by a single pole, seems forlorn. The rest of the Pompidou display sensibly discourages close comparisons and sets us on a treasure hunt instead. There are thirteen ensembles displayed ...”

“... method to the early 17th century has never been convincingly established. There is a circular ring of assumptions. First you assume that there are no quarrels of principle in the period; then you Namierise politics and politicians; then you claim that this shows there were no issues of principle. QED. An outsider cannot help but see a difficulty: if the ...”

“... than in the Iliad (Simone Weil’s attempt to misread Homer’s fierce battle-songs in a Virgilian-Christian register is indicative). And even the Odyssey, so much closer to us than its partly archaic predecessor, retains, when looked at soberly, a deep strangeness. At a time when European history is again essentially European, when the matter of Europe’s ...”

“... souls. As well as the scientists and theologians (two imams, a rabbi and almost all flavours of Christian), there were Greenlanders on board. For a population only the size of Inverness, sprinkled round the edges of the biggest island in the world, they fielded an impressive team of writers, professors, ministers in the Greenland Home Rule Government and ...”

“... the terrorist attack in Manhattan on 11 September. Such riverside services were common among Christian Yoruba believers. Checked, but not baffled, the police now came up with a brilliant stroke of publicity. ‘Until we can identify him and his family we will act as his family,’ Commander Baker said. ‘And to remind everyone that he was a person we ...”

“... silver. But when Derek McLennan dug down, he pulled out something more substantial, a silver arm-ring. The story goes that he immediately shouted ‘Viking!’ Buried alongside it were a decorated silver pendant cross on a chain of very finely coiled silver wire (which turned out to be Anglo-Saxon, but could still be Viking loot) and a layer of silver ...”

“... nature. The founding father was Konrad Lorenz, who followed the vastly popular King Solomon’s Ring with the immensely influential On Aggression. Then came The Naked Ape (Desmond Morris) and The Territorial Imperative (Robert Ardrey), which made the idea of aggression in defence of territory a household phrase as the name of an instinct which men, like ...”

“... map. When he tried to sum up what he stood for, he employed an empty, airy rhetoric, with a fine ring to it and a diffusely elastic import. ‘I am neither Whig nor Tory,’ he said in 1832. ‘My politics are described by one word, and that word is England.’ Four years later, even more sure that he was not one of nature’s Whigs, he was inventing his own ...”

“... better. We are often told that something is ‘incongruent with Judaism’ or ‘has a foreign ring to Jewish ears’ when there are well-known historical examples to the contrary. A Marrano fast for Yom Kippur is apparently un-Jewish because it begins with the words: ‘this blood which I deprive of my body, I offer to you, so that my soul will be ...”

“... spreads through every member.’ Here surely begins the revulsion against the asceticism of the Christian tradition, which had begun with St Jerome and his praise of alousia, the state of being unwashed: ‘He who has once bathed in Christ has no need of another bath.’ The practical result was that baths, variously described as Turkish, Roman and ...”

“... intentions. Third, that in our time the most prevalent mis-imputation of an intention has been Christian. All six authors are seen in relation to Christianity, though not solely so. The possibilities other than Christianity are then an important part of the rescue-work. Marvell lived in an age when ‘natural magic’ and fairies were respectable, and when ...”

“... to oust him, most virulently by the Nazis. He stands as the first great Jewish composer, yet was a Christian convert, a practising Lutheran, who quite possibly never entered a synagogue. His grandfather Moses Mendelssohn – who was among Europe’s first significant Jewish philosophers – was a decisive force in the creation of a German cultural environment ...”

“... female remains, a cup-marked stone buried in a rock-lined pit and, in the middle of the circle, a ring cairn with a central ‘cist’ or stone box grave. There were signs that there had been a timber circle at one time and also indications that the site had remained in use into the Iron Age. With all this information it was felt possible to reconstruct ...”

“... school of Letterfrack, with its unmarked grave for delinquent boys, who were abused by the Christian Brothers in a town that turns its back to the sea. As I drive along this road, the weatherman on the radio promises a day ‘bog agus gaolach’: soft and windy, or, as translated half an hour later, in the English language forecast, ‘blustery, with ...”