“... mean something like ‘went boldly on public record’. To his intimates he was candid enough. To John Blaikie, one of his earliest friends, he recounted in 1874 how, on the occasion of an accident that had put him in fear of death, ‘the Christian revealed religion had never seemed so little worthy of belief.’ When ...”

“... the king and the restoration of the monarchy was a nullity. By this simple and efficient process John Cooke, the barrister who prosecuted Charles I, has been airbrushed from history, save by a handful of historians of the trial who have written him off as a hack. Geoffrey Robertson has set out to rescue him from the enormous disregard of posterity, and from ...”

“... sent to Lewes by his literary friends on receiving copies of his clearly lamentable novels. John Stuart Mill wrote explaining that he needed to read the book through a second time before making his comments, though meanwhile he liked it ‘on the whole decidedly better than I expected from your own account of it’, Bulwer Lytton pronounced: ‘You have ...”

“... a department store, but her distrust of men was confirmed by the discovery that he did it not from Christian motives, but because he enjoyed squeezing her arm and had designs on her mother: an Ibsen-like scenario. Still, it was her big chance: the store commissioned a publicity film, she was chosen to model in it, and her amazing photogenic quality was ...”

“... question and her grace is hardly compatible with so low and ludicrous a subject. In Only Connect John Shearman also objects to this theory, not for prudish reasons but on technical grounds: Velásquez ‘has not given us the geometrical information that would allow such a calculation to be made’. However, Shearman feels that he does have enough information ...”

“... are so fond of the ‘inscrutability’ of Japanese faces. I fear, then, for this splendid book by John David Morley, based on his three-year stay in Japan during the mid-Seventies, which adopts the approach of assuming the Japanese to be human beings, and rather ordinary ones at that. Pictures from the Water Trade is a mixture of narrative, descriptive ...”

“... its lack of actual independence tolerable. There was only one problem: if Augustus wasn’t king (John Drinkwater translates princeps, the evasive, multivalent honorific used by and of Augustus, as ‘boss’), how was power to be transferred when he died? Much care was taken to fudge the answer. With a suitable show of reluctance, Tiberius allowed the senate ...”

“... upbeat: the future may be frightening for Fr Leahy, but only as it once was for those early Christian monks who rowed away into the unknown. All Trevor’s narrative gifts are evident in this story. The short paragraphs, cut and chiselled, are those of a puritan stylist. Vital pieces of information are quietly slipped in in mid-paragraph. The technique ...”

“... gone, as are the next-door Bethesda Buildings, where Charles and Henry’s parents, Thomas and Christian, lived. Bethesda was the pool in Jerusalem where Jesus healed the sick, but the names of other contemporary Baptist chapels nearby are less consoling and make clear how thoroughly these rural congregations knew the Old Testament. Upavon’s chapel is ...”

“... The American author of the words, Anna Walker, is invoking the declaration of Christ himself (John 9:4): ‘I must work the works of Him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.’ Good works in this general sense could be performed by an invalid Evangelical lady, flat on her back but radiating piety. There has, however, been ...”

“... with ostensibly dead subject-matter. For instance, Herbert’s ‘A Wreath’, which explores the Christian idea that humility contains a greater glory. For most non-Christian readers (and for a few Christians) this proposition can hardly seem the red-hot tip it once was. It is no longer news. No one is going to reel away ...”

“... The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Post-Socialist Change (1999) and more briefly in John Gray’s The Immortalisation Commission.* Preserving Lenin’s body from further decay is a bit like painting the Forth Bridge: every 18 months the body is bathed in a potassium acetate-glycerin solution and careful maintenance done on the accumulating skin ...”

“... sense to speak of salvation or redemption. Surely the idea of personal salvation is specifically Christian, and also in any case childish? No to both questions. Johnston has a particular interest in Christianity, and regularly uses its distinctive idioms, but any religion that offers different final outcomes for the good and the bad operates with a notion of ...”

“... that the ageing Coleridge was pursuing with himself. That argument was about Unitarianism, the Christian heresy within which Coleridge had come of age but which he spent much of his adult life repudiating. Barbauld represented Unitarian culture at its most public and accomplished. Born in 1743, Anna Letitia Aikin was the product of a distinguished ...”

“... to have been the fleeting ten thousand. Nor did he fail them. Bubbling with pride, he once told John Mortimer in a Sunday Times interview about the prostitutes he had known: ‘I treated them with consideration and like a gentleman. I always let them have their pleasure first. And of course I was enough of a connoisseur to know if their pleasure was ...”