“... 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 ...”

“... A rich​ old American in John Banville’s new novel makes an amused distinction between money and small change. Asked what money is, he just laughs. This is not malevolent laughter but he does do a dangerous thing with his money. He leaves a lot of it, when he dies, to a young American niece. She is grateful, of course, and the money enhances her freedom – at first ...”

“... a sane, amusing, unintimidating introduction to the consequences of mathematical illiteracy, John Allen Paulos shows how a little arithmetic can cast light on the cohesiveness of cultures. He quotes an experiment in which the psychologist Stanley Milgrim gave each member of a randomly-selected group of people a document and a ‘target individual’ to ...”

“... after all, interesting in their own right. The plot sometimes creaks, though no more loudly than John Spurling’s The Ragged End or Ben Elton’s eco-farce Stark. These books try for the global range and include by reference and implication huge volumes of contemporary history. Stories which bring in two world wars or the coming eco-crisis or the sunset of ...”

“... of mind’, it must be a broad category indeed to contain two such different representatives as John Henry Newman and James Fitzjames Stephen. They shared a distrust of reform and democracy, a love of England, and a penchant for getting into controversy in print. Otherwise, they strike one as chalk and cheese, or ‘dog and fish’, as Newman put it, à ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his lean family. The Cranfields were fearsomely ascetic. Mother held them up as great examples of Christian obligation and modesty, especially ‘the Cranfield girls’, twin daughters who both eventually became ministers in the Church of Scotland. ‘You must try to be more like the Cranfield girls,’ Mother would often say. The Cranfield sisters had ...”