“... too. Certainly Jews and Catholics faced a common threat, for if Jews were believed to have any Christian credentials, those credentials were Catholic ones. The small and secret Jewish community, whose existence was revealed to the public by Menasseh ben Israel’s campaign, worshipped at the Spanish Embassy – and in 1655 England and Spain were at ...”

“... generally assume that he wrote the poem for a learned community familiar with classical and Christian literature, a degree of sophistication more easily found in an 11th-century monastery than at a Norman court. But the story reads like a fable; it’s full of the bears, dogs, horses and donkeys that populate Aesop’s tales. It’s possible that its ...”

“... to us but which were nothing to be ashamed of in the 1780s and 90s – gluttony, for instance. John Beresford, who edited the Diary just after the First World War, sees it all quite differently, and his Introduction and Notes are a period piece in themselves. For Beresford, the Norfolk parson was ‘that very rare and beautiful bird – a typical ...”

“... of servants’ (Genesis 9. 25). After the defeat of an Italian army at Adowa in 1896 by the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, the only African country to withstand the Scramble, the term took on a powerful political dimension. Ethiopian movements played a part in such political insurgency as the Bambata rebellion of 1906 and ...”

“... Welles to record an immediate response. Welles was the original activist-actor, the precursor of John Wayne and Jane Fonda, if not Ronald Reagan. Hoping to reclaim the prodigal for the theatre, the Broadway producer Billy Rose addressed an open letter to him: ‘Listen, Thunder-in-the-Mountains, isn’t it about time you made up your mind whether you’re ...”

“... on it in gold thread, and accompanied by a crowd of Jewish supporters. Egidio was a learned Christian cabbalist and preacher who called for a world conqueror to defeat the Turk and usher in a golden age, and as Miriam Eliav-Feldon has pointed out, the cardinal’s eschatological excitement made him respond eagerly to Reuveni’s claims.† When the ...”

“... works designed for a popular audience, like the Ars moriendi, guiding the reader towards a good Christian death, or The Apocalypse of St John (John’s vision of a celestial battle between good and evil), or the Biblia pauperum, with images of Old and New Testament stories. Some block ...”

“... own prose, and in the facts proven by Science; but he was revolted by tame, as he thought them, Christian conceptions of God and morally and politically was a rabid deteriorationist, for whom all historical movement was downwards. In the most exuberantly anti-social moments of his correspondence he writes as Disgusted of Croisset, whose opinion it is in the ...”

“... by theft and elopement and then by legal coercion to hand over a mass of wealth to Jessica and her Christian husband, Lorenzo. An Elizabethan audience would have responded with mixed feelings. On the one hand, Jessica takes and is then given by the Venetian court the sort of marriage portion and legacy she would expect. That she changes her faith would ...”

“... kind of thing. Gray’s first poetic response to West’s death was in Latin, a Roman rather than Christian lament added to his work in progress, ‘De Principiis Cogitandi’. In contrast, his much assailed English sonnet perfectly balances the resources of learning and the fact of grief. While, as a critic, Mack is thoughtful and helpful about Gray’s ...”

“... consisted of eleven elected settlers, five elected Indians, one elected Arab and one nominated Christian missionary ‘to advise on the affairs of the African population’. The Indians and Arabs were unhappy about the disparity of representation since together they outnumbered the settlers by more than three to one (32,924 Indians and Arabs, 9651 ...”

“... Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill ...”

“... to a wider public, and in this respect can be seen at its best in a lucid account by its director, John Sutton, of many-handed research over the past twenty years in the vast region which lies between the Indian Ocean and the eastern periphery of the Congo Basin. What has been here at stake is partly the history of the coast and offshore islands, and partly ...”

“... with Memoirs from the Declaration of the War with Spain’, begun in 1746, now first published by John Brooke as an appendix to his edition. The title is misleading, for these are annals of the Hanoverian accession, and don’t get anywhere within hailing distance of Jenkins Ear. The date is significant: Robert Walpole had died in 1745, and a year later his ...”

“... Donne’s powers are, for John Carey, a matter of power, the poems being ‘the most enduring exhibition of the will to power the English Renaissance produced’. The praises of Donne in this critical work of amazing flair and obduracy are single-minded: Donne is here valued, supremely, for the power and tenacity of his ego, for his imaginative energy, for his desire to dominate or his rage for supremacy, and for the obsession with which he registered the contrarieties and contradictions of life ‘in all their urgent discord ...”