“... to approach from the outside. (Just one example of this latter category: Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron, a book which seems wholly to justify its use of Auschwitz, even though Styron is not a Jew, let alone a survivor of the Holocaust.) Literature is not in the business of copyrighting certain themes for certain groups. And as for risk: the real ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... among others, by Sayre’s father, whose credits include Annie Oakley, Gunga Din and, with William Faulkner and Nunnally Johnson, The Road to Glory) merely intensified an already entrenched aversion to collaboration, censorship, interference. Only Johnson, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, among the New York circle, flourished as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sterne’s novel, where Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby’s manservant, reflects on the opinion of King William (his former commander) ‘that everything was predestined for us in this world; insomuch, that he would often say to his soldiers, that “every ball had its billet” ’ Jacques’s first words are to quote this, the time-honoured sentiment of the ...”

“... complain that I am speaking in a tone that is too frivolous for a divine or too biting for a Christian’ – and here Erasmus ends and Burton begins – ‘not I, but Democritus said it.’ Sterne was himself a divine who had been accused of speaking too lightly, of indulging in extravagant praise of folly, and his Burton-inspired defence is that ...”

“... evolved slowly: the first professor of geriatric medicine wasn’t appointed until 1965 (William Ferguson Anderson at Glasgow). The treatment of geriatric patients was the subject of intermittent campaigns. In his 1964 study, The Last Refuge, the sociologist Peter Townsend stressed the frequent affronts to dignity and the lack of privacy and basic ...”

“... plain crosses. ‘The church,’ I wrote, ‘is part of that northern rail. It drinks from ancient Christian sources.’ A week after the first bombs, I have come back, by chance, at the one hour when the doors are open. Incense, taped chanting, dim light; a young woman kneeling, absolutely still, beside the rack of burning candles. She is Czech and leaves a ...”

“... Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never fails.Ernest William Hornung, always known as Willie, was born in Middlesbrough in 1866, the youngest of eight children of a coal merchant from Transylvania, Johan Petrus Hornung, who anglicised his name to John Peter. Willie was sent off to be thoroughly Englished at ...”

“... in fear of being forcibly circumcised. In pride of place is the portrait of Coryate engraved by William Hole; around its cartouche lounge a trio of bosomy courtesans, one of whom is shown vomiting over his head. Another illustration by Hole, inserted in the text, shows Coryate bowing in greeting to a famous Venetian courtesan, Margarita Emiliana. The ...”

“... eternal separation, and a shared spiritual life of honour. Whether or not Don Sebastian resembles William III is hard to argue about, where the political life, and the active life are all a cancelling out. As Dorax sharply says: My master? – By what title? Because I happened to be born where he Happened to be king? Take reason out of passion, take God ...”

“... his older brother, Jonathan (‘Yoni’), and grew up in Katamon, a neighbourhood dominated by Christian Arabs before the 1948 War. (A third son, Iddo, was born in 1952.) In 1963, the boys were uprooted when their father, convinced that he had been blacklisted by academia, moved the family to Elkins Park, a leafy suburb of Philadelphia. For a Revisionist ...”