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“... anticlerical French model, was misguided rather than vicious. This distinction was confirmed by John Robison, professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh, in Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe (1797). British Masonry stood in a different relationship to the visible Establishment. Whereas in 1738 Pope Clement XII’s ...”

“... to the mystique. When the former army chaplain Robert Bacon visited the ‘Shakers’ God’, John Robins, in London in around 1650, he found Robins sitting on a bed before his disciples speaking in tongues: ‘But the words he spake I did not understand, only they seemed to me to be a mixture of Latin, and some other tongues (they said Hebrew) and all ...”

“... and a date: 1633. This was the year a local gentleman, Sir John Reresby of Thrybergh Hall, began to note the contents of his garden. Every peach, pear and plum is catalogued, as are herbs, shrubs, bulbs – ‘Kentish Codlings’, ‘the Granado Gilliflower’, ‘Melincholly Munkes hoode’ – and attempts at grafting ...”

“... the strange ways in which it might affect the world.The mystical efficacy of text was essential to Christian cosmology. In the beginning, the word was with God; at the end, a passage in Revelation describes an angel appearing to St John holding an open book and instructing him to eat it: ‘it will make your stomach ...”

“... the Israeli military targeted water-drilling machines that lay idle on a construction site in the Christian district of Ashrafieh in the centre of Beirut. It is difficult to think of anywhere in Lebanon where Hizbullah ‘terrorists’ are less likely to be hiding. A few hours earlier the Israeli foreign minister had announced that Israel was not attacking ...”

“... the D-mark while, simultaneously, being resigned to its disappearance. Senior MPs of both Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union and the opposition Social Democrats have told each other not to discuss the Maastricht deficit criteria because they might unsettle a) the financial markets and b) the federal citizen. Even the Greens have been brought into the ...”

“... land of pagan Slavs, Balts and Finns to the East, while more or less forcibly intruding on that of Christian Celts to the West. They even, though again only for a time, seized control of Greece and Constantinople. Expansion was fronted and energised by an ‘aristocratic diaspora’ from the one-time heartland of the Carolingian Empire in Northern France and ...”

“... aimed at the popular audience Coupland has always nurtured. Yet their reverent tone and persistent Christian echoes – baptism, the Last Day, the Garden of Eden – make a deeper claim. Coupland seems to be serious about his mysticism, in a shy sort of way. He shares the old worry at having to use words to assert the value of wordlessness, at the deadening ...”

“... and so on. ‘The old school tie counted even more in Labour than in Conservative circles,’ John Colville observed. Despite the book’s title, he was anything but ‘the inevitable prime minister’. It isn’t just a matter of his undoubted conservatism on the matters listed above. After Oxford he had started to train as a lawyer but got distracted by ...”

“... same year, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum compared the Biafrans’ plight to that of Jews in Nazi Germany. John Lennon returned his MBE as a protest against the UK’s support of the federal government. Martin Amis, then a university student, was shocked to encounter ‘an incredible reactionary … who supports Nigeria against Biafra’; the same person, it turned ...”

“... as she and we are made to read ‘A Sermon’ in which he abstracts the lessons of her life into Christian orthodoxy. It does not even have the strange and mad elements of Cecilia, in which London is a genuinely frightening and violent place. The ‘female difficulties’ that we can sense in her letters – the awkward conversations at balls, the uncertain ...”

“... contribution, however, is Jean-Marie Mayeur’s essay on ‘De Gaulle as Politician and Christian’, for the whole point about de Gaulle was that, although he came from the classic conservative stables of the Army and Catholicism, he was not an ordinary clerical or military conservative. Most clerics supported Vichy, which he opposed; he included ...”

“... race, they have endured a persecution the records of which will for ever remain a reproach to the Christian nations of Europe. Ireland has no share in this black record. Our country has this proud distinction – freely acknowledged by Jewish writers – of never having resorted to this un-Christian and barbarous treatment ...”

“... slaves have souls to save, so do their masters; each is impeding the other in this endeavour. The Christian religion is a subversive force, or so the masters fear; the slaves start to believe that everyone is equal in the sight of God. It persuades them that ‘one thing is right and another thing wrong’ – whereas properly speaking, they should surrender ...”

“... as a nationalist alternative. Nothing exemplified the new political culture more tellingly than John McGrath’s play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973), which the 7:84 theatre company took on tour round Scotland. The play itself was impeccably socialist; but audiences were more alert to its unintended nationalist message. Indeed, there ...”