“... 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 ...”

“... in the feeling that belongs to it’. Some Southerners wandered further from the beaten path. William Brown Hodgson of Georgia entered the State Department in 1824 and, without the benefit of a university education, became the most prodigious linguist of his time. He played an important role in persuading American diplomats of the need to master other ...”

“... Harriet Westbrook, Shelley’s first wife. But it seems unlikely that the organised, ambitious and Christian young poet would have been attracted to a disorderly atheist like Shelley, or that she would have drowned herself had Shelley left her. After all, when Arthur Hemans deserted her, announcing that he was going to Rome to recover his health, she simply ...”

“... God’s work in this life. Radkau and others suggest that Weber would also have been affected by William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, which also appeared in 1902, not least by James’s suggestion that ‘the real core of the religious problem’ lies in a cry for help. The two men met in Boston in 1904, in the course of what for Weber was an ...”

“... her skills in verbal defiance. These early and thankless battles, as Wollstonecraft’s husband, William Godwin, recalled after her death, ‘instead of humbling her roused her indignation’. Her ‘numerous projects of activity and usefulness’, like her craving for love and attention, sprang from the early experience of being overlooked and disliked by ...”

“... extramarital pregnancy and beatings didn’t seem to bother teachers, though some composed Christian works based on Terence’s plays in order to have a cleaner alternative. Even these versions, however, retained some of the provocative elements that made Terence’s dramas so memorable. Dulcitius, a hagiographical play by the tenth-century German ...”

“... Endymion and gifts for the local rulers, including some gunpowder and a kaleidoscope. To hide his Christian identity he assumed the unconvincing pseudonym ‘el Ritchie’. The reader can only watch in sad fascination as this little figure from Regency London, asthmatic and under-financed, recedes further and further into the dust and danger of Africa until ...”

“... that this occurred after the Reformation, for Thomas tells us that ‘since Anglo-Saxon times the Christian Church in England had stood out against the worship of wells and rivers. The pagan divinities of grove, stream and mountain had been expelled, leaving behind them a disenchanted world to be shaped, moulded and dominated.’ Although Thomas is right to ...”

“... death in 1658 – he was the de facto laureate to the new state. He also became tutor to William Dutton, who was a member of Cromwell’s household. At this time Marvell was referred to as ‘a notable English-Italo-Machiavellian’ – for reasons that are mysterious he had the reputation of being a crafty and powerful figure. In 1657 he entered the ...”

“... with orgasmic sadism. As Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris note in Standard Operating Procedure, Christian iconography places at its centre an implement of torture and, in the stigmata, offers an all too human scourge with which to flay flesh raw. Of course, millions of Christians and infidels have proved unable to stay the pleasure until they reach the ...”