“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”