“... appears to suggest a reason why Clift’s character, Michael Logan, should become a Roman Catholic priest. The war had made these characters, giving them confidence, troubling them with memories. So it was perhaps that the 1950s were the decade of neurosis. For all their resistance to the ‘torn T-shirt brigade’, even older stars such as John Wayne and ...”

“... Protector he had behaved like a monarch. Hence his reputation suffered with both sides because, as Christopher Hill put it, he had been both Robespierre and Napoleon. With Cromwell thus effectively hors de combat, the Roundheads’ successors concentrated on rehabilitating or redesigning Edmund Ludlow. A republican, a regicide and a Puritan, Ludlow had ...”

“... found that even in London, it was a minority sect, at least until the early years of Elizabeth. Christopher Haigh, who describes himself as an ex-Methodist Anglican agnostic, decided that this revisionist band needed a leader, and headed into battle with a stream of publications that came to full fruition in English Reformations: Religion, Politics and ...”

“... Coleman ‘sitting in bed wearing a fisherman’s jersey busily defacing Miss Weil’s Letter to a Priest’. It’s nice of her to make it sound as if that’s funny. ‘If you borrow Emily’s Wordsworth you will not read Wordsworth but Emily’s Wordsworth,’ Antonia White said. ‘She will fearlessly correct and alter passages. She does not read; she ...”

“... presence of two anti-boy women ... complicated the atmosphere, because Benjamin likes to be with Christopher and Wystan, all boys together without disturbing foreign elements such as slightly hostile ladies and gentlemen hostile to gay music.’ Pears sang a song which Britten had made from one of Spender’s poems, ‘a very Stephenish one full of slightly ...”

“... unreliable, and Roy Jenkins too remote. Crosland seemed to be the man. After all, he was the high priest of revisionism. He had charted its course in happier days. Who better to lead it through the storms that followed Gaitskell’s death? For most of my Parliament – the strange, confused, ultimately tragic Parliament of 1966-1970 – I thought of myself as ...”

“... as a drunken whore. Resurgence from these depths takes an odd form. Genetha seduces a Catholic priest. Patriarchy’s malign influence exorcised, she revives and takes up with Esther, the former servant, who now runs a very orderly house of prostitution. The epilogue jumps twenty years to find the heroine snoozing on the porch at dawn, serenely awaiting ...”

“... theorist, historian and politician Alexis-Charles-Henri-Clérel de Tocqueville, to the troubled priest Félicité de Lamennais, whose ultimately unsuccessful struggle to reconcile his faith with his politics made him one of the most famous thinkers in the pre-1848 world; from George Sand, who refused to stand for election to the French National Assembly on ...”

“... as a student. ‘That has nothing to do with it,’ she snaps. It turns out that she knows the priest: ‘My mother believed in the importance of good personal contacts, even in her dealings with the Almighty.’ Promise at Dawn – which Gary, as John Markham Beach, translated into English in 1961, adding new passages as he went along – tells the story ...”

“... of late Miller (or, more accurately, last two-thirds Miller) is provided by the British critic Christopher Bigsby. For Bigsby, Miller has ‘quite consciously experimented with form’, not just in the later plays but throughout his career. Writing about The Archbishop’s Ceiling of 1977 (in which a group of East European intellectuals spend an evening in ...”

“... is further orphaned by being packed off to school. On his way there, accompanied by an uncle and a priest (you need to consult the notes to be quite sure that Chekhov thought Father Christopher silly), Yegorushka travels the prairies of Southern Russia, as Chekhov had lately done and as he had done before in his youth. He ...”

“... how to put their disproportionate feelings of panic to good use. One of Westphal’s patients, a priest, experienced an overwhelming anxiety whenever he had to leave the protection of the vaulted roof of his church, but was able to walk in the open beneath an umbrella. A more interesting case, widely circulated in the literature, concerns a cavalry officer ...”

“... full Arabic Quran with a translation and notes was published in Padua in 1698, by the Catholic priest Lodovico Marracci. He undertook the task – which took up much of his long life – out of a belief that it would help missionaries to refute Islam, yet his rigour, and his insistence that anti-Islamic argument should be based on informed dialogue rather ...”

“... by the King James. Bishop Robert Lowth explained it in detail in 1753 in Oxford, and inspired Christopher Smart, who attended the lectures, to use the form for his Jubilate Agno. Alter emphasises this by splitting each line into two, with the second one indented, giving the poem a more ‘modern’ look, but it is hard to see why this is ‘more ...”

“... scholars – C.K. Stead, Ronald Bush, Julius himself – believe that the review was by Eliot. Christopher Ricks doesn’t disagree with this judgment – whether or not Eliot wrote the review, he observes in T.S. Eliot and Prejudice, it has ‘the stamp of his approval and the stamp of his tone’. Calling the anonymous notice ‘shameful’, Ricks ...”