“... So do the names of people for whom Erasmus scholars feel especial warmth – Grocyn, say, or William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who put up with a great deal, for Erasmus could be difficult even with patrons. The second son of a concubinary priest, and himself a monk living irregularly, Erasmus had clearly arrived. He mattered. He was conscious ...”

“... of Peter Pan. Unlike certain of his predecessors, Carpenter claims, J.M. Barrie distorted his Christian model satisfactorily, and provided for his readers an alternative source of numinous sensation. However, the case he makes out for admiring Barrie would seem to rest on his perception of the frightful play ‘on its deepest level’ as ‘a satire of ...”

“... from Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Basque region, even Oklahoma (where revolutionary anarchism meets Christian eschatology), some of the mud, or Semtex, inevitably sticks. To guard against stereotyping and name-calling, accurate information about Islam has never been more urgently required in the west. What does ‘Islam’ actually say about terrorism, holy ...”

“... local languages should be preserved and propagated via printed grammars and dictionaries, men like William Carey in India and Heinrich Schon in West Africa effectively influenced which colonial peoples and cultures became more influential. Moreover, in the process of being reduced to order by translators, clerks and printers, indigenous languages were filtered ...”

“... a fissured medieval Christendom, full of ethnic and religious tensions between Saxon and Norman, Christian and Jew. But even here he doesn’t give Scott credit for correctly representing contemporary anxieties. Sutherland finds the treatment of the Jewish characters problematical now – in fact racist – but doesn’t observe that in its own day it might ...”

“... it was looking as if both of these sources would soon be exhausted. In 1898, the English chemist William Crookes sounded a Malthusian alarm: the world’s population, he said, would very soon outstrip its food supply. This was a global crisis in the making, but, Crookes warned, it was especially acute for white people: ‘The fixation of nitrogen,’ he ...”

“... religious sensibility certainly survived, to be reanimated in Anglican form in the great phase of Christian writing that spanned Donne himself, Herbert and Vaughan, Milton and Marvell; in each of the three centuries that followed, there emerged in England a different religious poetry, orthodox and unorthodox. But the historians’ negations are helpful, and ...”

“... kept it there. A slightly unlikely but highly qualified member of Our (or Their) Age was William Empson, who went up to Cambridge in 1925 and down again in disgrace in 1929. There are three essays on Empson in this book, and he and his teacher I.A. Richards are in one sense its heroes, variable and (in Empson’s case) not always admirable advocates ...”

“... historical writing as there was on the subject – the work of the Anglo-German economic historian William Otto Henderson was the outstanding instance – tended to focus on refuting the allegations of violence and brutality that had led to the empire’s dismantling and redistribution at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. By the 1960s these arguments were no ...”

“... of his old self, Finkel said it was he. The reporter from the Oregonian said that a man named Christian Longo, who appeared to have killed his wife and three children, was on the run in Mexico, posing as a journalist from the New York Times called Michael Finkel. One might choose to describe the phone call as bad timing, but only if one knows nothing ...”

“... and ambition’. His idealism, however, is threatened by disillusionment. He longs for a purer Christian commonwealth, but doubts ‘faith and charity would be enough to settle religious differences between men,’ and soon admits not only that ‘Reform was being built on an edifice of lies and monstrous brutality,’ but that as Cromwell’s man he is ...”

“... as well have put up a sign reading ‘Coloured not admitted.’A more direct threat came from the Christian right. In his ‘Goodbye Christ’ of 1932, Hughes singled out for opprobrium ‘Saint Aimee McPherson’, a Pentecostal evangelist who had become a media celebrity. His attack didn’t go unnoticed, and in 1940 McPherson orchestrated a picket of a gala ...”

“... animals, but rather those active in international work, pre-eminently Oxfam but also War on Want, Christian Aid, Save the Children and a few others. Sasson has interesting things to say about the way in which these charities’ international aid projects came to affect social policy within Britain, but the voluntary sector tout court is not her subject. Once ...”

“... Road had previously been occupied by an American draft-decliner and notorious non-inhaler, William Jefferson Clinton. It’s tempting to compare the parallel careers of these two men, both conservative liberals, advocates of small freedoms. Men of the Sixties. Charismatic hustlers with an eye for a deal. Provincials trading on cracker-barrel ...”