“... if you prefer, was just as much intended as a remedy against arbitrary rule as the invitation to William of Orange and the Glorious Revolution (like William, Louis had a claim to the English throne through his wife, Blanche, granddaughter of Henry II). Yet it has been erased from the national memory. Louis’s ...”

“... of refined barbarians. The pantheon contains John Vanbrugh, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, S.S. Teulon, William Butterfield, Frederick Pilkington, Dominikus and Gottfried Böhm, Claude Parent, Rodney Gordon, Richard Rogers (in his Gothic moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of Italian Fascism Douglas Stephen, architect of a ...”

“... natural history within a ‘big history’ such as those outlined by the American writers David Christian and Cynthia Stokes Brown – or, in the terminology of Edward O. Wilson, in a ‘consilience’, a convergence of intellectual disciplines, humanities with science. Ultimately, all teaching in the fine arts department pays a kind of homage to ...”

“... translates it as virgo, adding divine authority to the virulent cult of sexual disgust that shaped Christian moral theology (the Quran, free from this linguistic trap, does not connect Mariam/Mary’s miraculous nature with moral horror of sex).* The apple Eve offered Adam, Polizzotti amusingly points out, could have been an apricot. Or an orange or a ...”

“... both to libel the unfortunate Vespucci, who had no intention of giving a new continent his Christian name, and to demonstrate his own integrity as an investigative author. Hemingway’s sense of accuracy on the page is the reverse effect of the lies he told about himself. Kipling, on the other hand, probably never told a lie in his life, although his ...”

“... Kempe, about whose orthodoxy there was at least considerable doubt, had as her parish priest William Sawtry, the first man to be burnt to death for Lollardy. If the authorities who interrogated her had known that, they might have felt that this was prima facie proof of contagion. Yet as far as one can tell, Sawtry had no influence on Margery Kempe at ...”

“... and his works that Coker was derived in part from Hamilton’s elder brother Richard, whose Christian name provided the famous pseudonym, and who, quite clearly, was anything but a lout in the eyes of the author. And there’s a Cliff House character named Dolly whom Drotner persists in calling Jolly, as though to superimpose mood over nomenclature. The ...”

“... story of the fall in paradise, and rewrites it in the bleakest terms. This is a book that makes William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the most eminent of its literary forefathers, look like a study in innocence – perhaps because its undeviating gaze focuses on Eve, not Adam. Like Atwood, Wiggins places her fall in remembered history. Charlotte and ...”

“... a logical yet slightly crazy synthesis between the principles of hierarchical purity and those of Christian morality. In his eyes, one disorder is always liable to lead to another, as with Cardinal de Bouillon, a sodomite who finally turned traitor, had strong links with the Jesuits, and got the great érudit Baluze in hot water for validating some of his ...”

“... only Confucius can guide a man ‘through the jungle of propaganda and fads that has overgrown Christian theology’.) And Voltaire outlined the picture of the sleeping dragon which was to inspire later dreams and nightmares. In their remote past the Chinese had made many discoveries ‘all at once’, but proved incapable of following them up, whereas the ...”

“... no longer smiles.’ Britain is no longer a distinctively Protestant, even a distinctively Christian nation. There is no great likelihood of war with a European nation, no obvious enemy without; no empire; no commercial supremacy; no obvious new ground on which to rebuild the national identity of Britain. Whether the Union can survive without a clearer ...”

“... and the possible derivation of late accounts like Snorri’s from learned European sources, Christian, Neoplatonic and even Judaic. This, though, turns attention away from the consistently idiosyncratic nature of the myths, which is the first thing everyone notices about them. The reason for O’Donoghue’s caution becomes clear in the book’s final ...”

“... he is preoccupied with the images that come to define our collective and personal memories. Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve in 1921, Marker (one of his many pseudonyms) spent his childhood, depending on which story you believe, in Cuba, Mongolia or l’Ile aux Moines in the Morbihan. He attended the lycée Pasteur in Paris with ...”

“... and 10:04 incorporate passages of literary and art criticism (on John Ashbery’s poems, or Christian Marclay’s film The Clock) into their narratives, some of it taken almost verbatim from Lerner’s own published essays. It’s a remarkable thing to create a narrator who can credibly launch into actual written criticism in a way that seems natural ...”

“... as its veracity. Take that diamond of a title: one of the most astonishing episodes in the Christian tradition fused with a tentative Latinate gesture of a word, the promise of a great happening but not any time soon. Mythology’s most astonishing answer to a human wish is coupled to the sound of human wish at its humblest, most humdrum, least ...”