“... than is the wealthy Jeremiah French, just as he is more like a clergyman (and a primitive Christian) than the boisterous Mr Porter. Turner’s tart reactions to his betters are rather like those of an NCO observing the officer class; suppressed rancour jaundices his descriptions of social life in East Hoathly. His excellence as an observer derives ...”

“... spurred on by the medical profession, set out to curb the tobacco industry. They were Kenneth Robinson and David Owen (Labour) and Sir George Young (Tory). All three were routed. The hardest fighter of the three was Sir George Young. His determination to cut down, for instance, on tobacco’s sponsorship of sports made him unpopular in those parts of the ...”

“... as necessary concessions in a larger strategic game designed to defeat the forces of the anti-Christian papacy. Insisting that Walsingham followed his conscience when it came into conflict with his duty to queen and country, Cooper suggests that there are times when he resembles his predecessor as principal secretary, Thomas More, executed for refusing to ...”

“... least attractive women in the congregation (at 13, this was important). The frondy dresses worn by Christian women in the late Seventies and the visionary intensity gave everything an odd resemblance to the film of Woodstock that I first saw at the age of 12 (Joe Cocker as rhapsode). I was disturbed at how many adults broke into tears during these ...”

“... of Elizabeths, Sarahs, Janes and variform Anns (Nancys, Nans and Hannahs), you would have the Christian names of something close to 80 per cent of the female population. There was a similar pattern with Johns. About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the ...”

“... that nearly scans, about Saladin and his betrothed, the unfortunate Princess Erminia, who loves a Christian. Although Linnaean classifications were ‘too smutty’ for English women – all those reproductive organs – she was an ardent botanist, and sent expeditions to Africa, to bring back geraniums. While other bluestockings might have found themselves ...”

“... During the Middle Ages both she and her work were largely forgotten. (According to one legend, the Christian patriarch Gregory of Nazianzos, offended by the licentiousness of her subject-matter, put her books to the torch in 380 AD.) Neither Dante nor Chaucer refers to her. Only with the recovery and translation of certain ancient texts in the Renaissance ...”

“... he commented. (The matter was all the more delicate since the dummy book affected to be a work of Christian morality and was therefore even more conspicuous. When the book was finally concealed on the shelves Sartre commented: ‘C’est tout de même utile, la littérature.’) There will, obviously, be other books about Sartre’s private life and it seems ...”

“... who largely founded Hollywood and ran the studios were thought to embody dangerous foreign or anti-Christian values. Thanks to Henry Ford, the Ku Klux Klan and an abundance of political nativists, mass immigration ended in 1924, but as far as American purists were concerned, the damage had been done. The capital of this polluted nation was Hollywood; the men ...”

“... shows, he wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, which was published in 1678, not only as a guide to the Christian life, but as an attempt to shape the Restoration crisis of 1667-73 by setting liberty of conscience against the state’s authority and the conformity of the rich, the corrupt, the careerist and the spineless. Greaves says there is ‘no escaping the ...”

“... Eric Griffiths. In an essay included in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (1985, edited by Peter Robinson), Griffiths expressed reservations about Hill’s ‘unsteady reliance on religious metaphors’ in his critical writings. In Hill’s essay ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement” ’ in particular, the idea that poetic language may escape from ...”

“... between Bosnia’s attempt to uphold a secular, pluralist Islamic culture – this time against Christian medievalism – and the Ayatollah’s attempt to define Islam as a theocratic uniformity. (In a rather mad piece in a recent New Yorker, Cynthia Ozick compared Rushdie to ‘a little Israel’, surrounded as he was by ravening Muslim wolves, and also ...”

“... social or cultural collapse, as Ben Jonson did, and this view is intemperately represented by Ian Robinson. He holds that the decline of the ceremonious style in the House of Commons is a clear indication of national decadence in this ‘century of the common man, of the “media”, and a “public opinion” definable by poll counts, the age of universal ...”

“... will bring us to Sunt lacrimae rerum may be ‘In this fallen world we weep’, and in adducing Christian theology that greatly falsifies Virgil. Next, ‘A verb taking one object is monotransitive, a verb taking two objects is ditransitive.’ ‘Monotransitive’, ‘ditransitive’: consider yourself present at the birth; neither of those words is to be ...”

“... that when he was a child in the 1820s Lady Hester Stanhope’s name was as well known to him as Robinson Crusoe’s, though he thought Crusoe was more believable. A century later, her table-talk (retailed in six volumes by her doctor-companion, Charles Meryon, and first published in 1845-46) was still being studied for the School Certificate. Admired as the ...”