“... the kingdom of England itself, but a large proportion testified to pious Anglo-Norman energy after William I’s conquest of England in 1066, resulting in the formation of a diverse range of communities whose distinctive ‘rules’ for communal life were an implied criticism of the monasteries that had gone before. Well-functioning monasteries constantly do ...”

“... was a student of Scientology and Dianetics, bought his daughter a three-year subscription to a Christian Science magazine when she was broke and ill, and dismissed all college professors as ‘a peerage of tin ears’. Salinger’s four books, now handsomely repackaged without advertisement or comment of any kind, were all unfinished in their way. Did ...”

“... of that unrecapturable, possibly mediocre presence, the poet’s wife: whose brother was called William Hathaway, Mr W.H. The prosaic is, in fact, more likely to foster the Dark Lady than events more historically picturesque. That writers have necessarily an interesting life, a belief prompted by the appreciative reading mind, is surely a ...”

“... Jew from Alexandria. He might as well have been. Born in Jerusalem in 1935 to well-off Palestinian Christian parents, he had grown up in the twilight years of multicultural Cairo, where many of his classmates were Egyptian Jews. His piano teacher was Ignace Tiegerman, a Polish Jew who had moved to Cairo in 1931 and founded a French-speaking ...”

“... decision to exempt Christians from his ban on immigrants from Syria, he said on 27 January on the Christian Broadcasting Network that he was merely executing a correction to the law under Obama, when ‘if you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible.’ That statement, if made ...”

“... or at least filled with the dying, he began to collect remains, and had those of his grandparents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, transported from St Pancras Old Church in London to the cemetery of St Mary’s in Bournemouth, where they lie today with his mother, Mary.After a number of ‘thundering influenzas’ late in 1884, the warmer months had ...”

“... woman, Florence Barger, as confidante. All this is fair enough; Forster, when he agreed first that William Plomer and then P.N. Furbank should write his biography, did not ask that matters of this kind should escape discussion. He lived the greater part of his life under a hated law that banned and might brutally punish his kind of sexuality; it long blighted ...”

“... just lying there, a whale drifting by, the mind getting set off by the music, it was some kind of christian thing for christ sake that was the fucking problem with country man it was like the sally army ye had to put up with god for a fucking half hour, ye heard good fiddles and banjos and it turned out to be a jesus-love-me effort never mind, never ...”

“... English Faculty Library, and was thus enabled to see why Aristotle was ‘the soundest basis for Christian doctrine’. At this time, about 1935, he was moving sedately towards the Church, and also rehearsing his Canadian version of agrarianism. And although he regarded his mind as nothing out of the ordinary, he began to sense a vocation, and to feel ‘a ...”

“... layer of the human mind, which constituted the vast reservoir of the German protest against Christian civilisation’. Ressentiment on this scale demands an object. The will whose triumph is bodied forth in Leni Riefenstahl’s camp classic found its pretext in the Versailles indemnities and the ‘stab in the back’ myth, but its real cause in the ...”

“... bully he is properly diffident, almost apologetic in his whimsical way. His man, Dthemetri, was a Christian from Zante (which was then part of the British Empire) and he had seen so much bullyng by the Muslims that it was hardly surprising that he should want to get his own back, with Kinglake’s authority behind him. Dthemetri was ‘in his sphere a true ...”

“... age.’ A sympathetic account of Cuvier makes an ideal introduction to Rupke’s reappraisal of William Buckland and the English School of Geology. For Rupke, too, is doing battle with the story that modern geology had its roots in the uniformitarianism of Hutton and Charles Lyell to the exclusion of the catastrophism of Cuvier and his English ...”

“... novel in the comic mode I was hoping to engage the interest and sympathy of non-Catholic and non-Christian readers as well, by presenting the ironies and absurdities of married life under the dispensation of the ‘Safe Method’ as one instance of the universal and perennial difficulty men and women experience in understanding, ordering and satisfying their ...”

“... Laura Curtis’s language strikes one as extravagant: she is importing a Romantic sublime or William Goldingesque apocalypticism into Defoe’s sober scene. Then what about the following? ‘In Chapter Two, I traced two tendencies in Robinson Crusoe and in A Journal of the Plague Year that conflict with Defoe’s compulsion to construct in his writing an ...”

“... And ten to wan the piper is a Cockney. By 1931 he was already proclaiming, in a letter to William Soutar, that he was not the man to write ‘bairn rhymes or re-popularise Scots’, though he still thought ‘re-vaccination of the children with it’ an excellent idea. Some difficult years – in personal matters – and a change of orientation in ...”