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“... 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 ...”

“... homelands, and the story of the death of the old lady in her old Scottish country house in ‘Miss Christian Jean’ are very different in their setting but similar in narrative tone. It is perhaps strange that a writer who could write with such passionate vigour of the abuses that embitter people’s lives could also write with such pure power of human ...”

“... was largely a third Bill Clinton term: Rahm Emanuel, Lawrence Summers, Tom Donilon, Leon Panetta, John Podesta and Hillary Clinton were called back and held over. The interlude of subsequent personal enrichment by Clinton, trading on her prestige and inside knowledge, has drawn attention in recent days, after the revelation of her large speaking fees on Wall ...”

“... the ‘deeper thinkers’ of the 1870s, carrying forward the social conscience of Dickens, while John Everett Millais, no less than his French homonym, possessed a manner affectingly and ‘personally intimate’.In chasing the works that Van Gogh looked at in London, the Tate exhibition takes us on some journeys in taste. It is easy enough to be stirred by ...”

“... of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy.’ I’m not sure this is convertible into any language, even an Indo-European one, but Dai’s translation has been a hit in China, as the Western media reported widely at the time of publication. Perhaps our literary taste has suddenly ...”

“... the fraught relationship between African Americans and Jews, as rival entertainers of white Christian America, in his disturbing book on blackface and the movies. American popular movies, about which Rogin wrote so brilliantly, enabled him to investigate the complex intersections of political, psychic, aesthetic and social forces that fascinated him all ...”

“... problems surrounding the familiar poll-tax registration setting of the first Christmas. Mark and John tell us nothing about Jesus’s birth; Matthew sets it in the reign of Herod the Great, to which Luke assigns the Annunciation. Luke’s specificity regarding the circumstances of the Nativity inspires confidence (2.1-5): ‘And it came to pass in those ...”

“... of dream and reverie was already familiar. As far back as 1701, the doctor and opium enthusiast John Jones said of the intoxicated (and intoxicating) state it brought about that ‘people do commonly call it a heavenly condition, as if no worldly Pleasure was to be compared with it’; and indeed Jones went further than De Quincey ever would in describing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Plymouth and travelled to London. With her came her husband, the English tobacco planter John Rolfe, and several members of her Native American family. Done up in embroidered silks and Flemish lace, she enjoyed – if that’s the right word – the adulation of the crowds and an audience with James I. She was not, in fact, a princess, however much ...”

“... he crosses out the word ‘harness’. Over on this side of the Channel, the native-born author John Braine chooses for his epigraph a snatch of neo-Romantic whimsy from the lyrics of the group Supertramp: Just as long as there’s two of us, just as long as there’s two of us I’ll carry on. Mutatis mutandis, here is the same, rather deprecatory ...”