“... 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 ...”

“... Newspaper Axis, American newspaper owners are shown putting their weight behind isolationism, what William Randolph Hearst preferred to call ‘America first’. He commissioned Hitler and Mussolini to write for his many newspapers (at $1 a word), and was delighted that Hitler had restored ‘character and courage’ to Germany. At a time when most Americans ...”

“... published an essay which concluded that ‘lynching is the aftermath of slavery.’ A year later, William A. Sinclair, who was born into enslavement, published The Aftermath of Slavery, a Study of the Condition and Environment of the American Negro. Terrell and Sinclair used the term ‘aftermath’ to make the point that their own era was contiguous with the ...”

“... of his closest friendships remained formal, mediated through books; his longstanding translator, William Weaver, recalled Calvino flinching every time he was obliged to call him ‘Bill’. In a preface to Numbers in the Dark, a collection of short and very short stories, Calvino’s widow, Esther, quotes a note from 1943 that she discovered among his ...”

“... come as a total surprise to either Wilde or his wife. It was in the blood. Wilde’s father, Sir William, who was an eye surgeon, had three illegitimate children before his marriage. The year Oscar was born his father began an affair with Mary Travers, the daughter of a colleague. She was also his patient. When Sir ...”

“... by quoting from ‘Gerontion’. The norm at Langley, Virginia is Episcopalian, though Mormons and Christian Scientists and better-yourself Catholics are common in the middle echelons, and Mailer has a go at creating a Jewish intellectual agent who is also, perhaps avoidably, the only self-proclaimed shirt-lifter.It is an intriguing fact, a fact of ...”

“... bodes Mischief, when ever it appears.’ Combining with ideas about the function and virtues of Christian women, this view ensured the near total exclusion of women from the burgeoning educational institutions, from schools, universities, societies and libraries, and from the pursuits for which higher education was necessary. (It is easy to forget how ...”