“... no one attends services. Muslims increasingly stood out as believers of a different religion in a Christian yet irreligious society. For many Norwegians, a stroll in parts of Oslo East became an unsettling experience. The sounds of Urdu and Arabic, the wearing of the hijab, even the smell of foreign food clashed with their idea of Norway. The country, many ...”

“... private fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America produced its own brand of freebooters, including William Walker, the Tennessee doctor who conquered and ruled Nicaragua for ten months and decimated the population of Costa Rica.Until the end of the 19th century the US state was in no position to undertake imperial projects outside its region, and its projected ...”

“... not very fond of them’ meant that Barbara had to take a note to school to say that she was now a Christian. The family then emigrated to Canada where she ‘gave in’, was baptised and confirmed but remained unhappy about what she had done. When she finished school she tried to join a synagogue, but they didn’t believe she was Jewish. Her stepfather made ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had employed slave-hunters to capture Somerset and put him on a boat for Jamaica. A baptised Christian, Somerset was able to appeal for support and a writ of habeas corpus was secured for his release. He went to Granville Sharp, who agreed to take the case. Sharp was concerned with the legality of slavery in England and especially troubled by ...”

“... leader in the Times on 26 October, which has all the portentous fingerprints of the editor, Sir William Haley.According to the Times, the queen had ‘come to be the symbol of every side of the life of this society, its universal representative in whom her people see their better selves ideally reflected’. That better self had to be reflected in the ...”

“... adopted the daring stance of separatism, joining those who denounced the Church of England as anti-Christian and worshipped outside it. His outspoken pamphlets in the late 1630s earned him a public whipping and an extended imprisonment from which, at the outset of the Long Parliament in 1640, ‘my old friend’ Cromwell secured his release. In the war the two ...”

“... upon the sea coast, and in the vicinity of lagoons, low woods and swamps,’ the English surgeon William Lempriere said in his Popular Lectures of 1830, ‘and prove an unfailing source of discomfiture, pain and disfigurement.’ They bit and they bothered, but they didn’t factor in thinking about the causes of agues and fevers or any other human ...”

“... as a quixotic attempt to write a novel without metaphor. (She had intended it to be governed by William Carlos Williams’s celebrated dictum: ‘no ideas but in things.’) The plan was evidently impossible, as the narrator of the novel repeatedly reflects: ‘even in the act of naming,’ she says at one point, ‘we make metaphors.’ It may well be that ...”

“... argument about whether Mendès-France was a Communist or a socialist, Willard’s host (played by Christian Marquand, an old actor friend of Brando’s and the director of Candy) gives an eloquent explanation of why they must stay in this place where they are not wanted, where their time is plainly over. The place is ours, he says, we brought the rubber from ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Alex Comfort​ was exhausting. After meeting him, the pioneering sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson swapped notes. ‘If we could learn to produce on a 24-hour level the way he does, I think we’d probably have it made,’ Johnson said. ‘Five or six hours is all I can stand,’ Masters replied ...”