“... it so good, because they amount to a profound analysis of what is fundamentally wrong with the Christian God.’ Empson (like Eliot, like Larkin) fashioned for himself a buffer persona, and equipped it with a repertoire of archaic slang. On one occasion, he intervened in a ‘small controversy’ about the wit of Marvell’s ‘Garden’ to suggest why the ...”

“... There is no single recorded instance of any public official, national or local, refusing a John Poulson bribe. And a lot of the time, Reggie Maudling was Home Secretary. Not that we should fall into the trap of criminal rationaliation: even if law and order and public morality are a sham, the illusion is necessary to keep miners down the mine. Biggs ...”

“... liberation. Despite this, Garvey was taken up by the religion as a divinely inspired prophet, the John the Baptist of Rastafari. By 1940, he too was in England. Haile Selassie declined an invitation to meet him. Garvey died that year, a fact that many of his unwanted followers refused to believe, and since Haile Selassie’s reported demise in 1975 his own ...”

“... Orchid the ‘I’ character is sent to a mildly dotty but unoppressive prep school, dedicated to Christian Science and tolerant of his feebleness at scouting and cricket. In The Goose Cathedral, by contrast, the prep school he is sent to is a hell on earth. As well as contradictions there are gaps and false trails. He is fond of discovering patterns in his ...”

“... than is the wealthy Jeremiah French, just as he is more like a clergyman (and a primitive Christian) than the boisterous Mr Porter. Turner’s tart reactions to his betters are rather like those of an NCO observing the officer class; suppressed rancour jaundices his descriptions of social life in East Hoathly. His excellence as an observer derives ...”

“... especially in German-speaking Europe, which owed their existence to a widespread interest in non-Christian forms of transcendence. Free association applied to political groups before it applied to words: an interest in esoteric mysteries appeared to many to be a perfectly fine reason to get together. The specific theology of these groups varied, but certain ...”

“... pair doomed to love’s inevitable ending are compared to poets, and poets to Jews. In this most Christian world Poets are Yids. The collection in which these appeared was significantly titled After Russia. It was followed by two verse plays, Ariadne and Phaedra, in which Tsvetaeva set out her characteristic views on love and its superior passions when ...”

“... He gives short histories of dozens of Bunyan’s contemporaries, noting, for instance, that John Kelyng, the judge who bullied Bunyan in 1661, had done 18 years in prison himself and had ‘grounds for feeling vengeful’; that Paul Cobb, the seemingly feeble Clerk of the Peace who tried to let Bunyan off, went on to become mayor twenty years later when ...”

“... world, whether in its precocious attempts at setting up a literate élite to create a truly Christian Europe, or in its shots at satirical poetry, music and arithmetic. Mr Leyser is aware that symbols can have the force of realities. His book ends with a brief, valuable and unflattering sketch of the Emperor Frederick II, who earned Nietzsche’s ...”

“... We get a glimpse of Cambridge high life: the gluttony and gambling – swans for the eating, Van John all night, with ‘the Dr’ picking up the tabs. Darwin laughed modestly at the paralysis of his faculties through inertia, but the image of enforced idleness at Christ’s is misleading. There was riding (his horse came up too), but more important he was ...”

“... His development will be worth watching. Compared to the eclectic, pyrotechnic scatter of Kid, John Burnside’s Feast Days is poised and tactful. His diction is chaste, like cool stones from clear water, with an occasional rarity raised from the bed of the river, a recondite word such as ‘alchemilla’ or ‘pleroma’, or a more common one, such as ...”

“... Selwyn Lloyd, to the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington to visit the American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had been discovered to have cancer during the week of the Suez war. Towards the end of the conversation, Dulles suddenly asked ‘Selwyn, why did you stop? Why didn’t you go through with it and get Nasser down?’ The British visitors ...”

“... the Commons, and brought to trial in front of the Lords. The prosecution prompted an outpouring of Christian sympathy from fellow high Anglicans. On the first Sunday after his impeachment the 58th psalm was sung at St Margaret’s Westminster and in several other pro-Sacheverell churches: ‘Break their teeth, O God, in their mouths.’ If in the long run the ...”

“... as described by historians such as Cassirer, Gay, Daniel Mornet, Franco Venturi, Robert Darnton, John Marshall (and myself) – dissolves in Israel’s dialectical thinking. Israel sees two Enlightenments, one radical and good, the other moderate and of mixed value at best. Born and educated in Britain, now teaching in the United States, he finds little of ...”

“... its first 48 years, a period of dominance interrupted only by the single-term administrations of John Adams and his son John Quincy. Conversely, 24 years after Andrew Jackson of Tennessee left the White House in 1837, the next generation of Southerners led 11 states out of the Union, founding a Southern Confederacy to ...”