“... and extensively promoted by physicians, apothecaries and barber-surgeons throughout the Christian West. Imported from the Middle East, the drug originally consisted of a mixture of pitch and asphalt, materials traditionally used in the mummification of dead bodies, but by the 12th century mumia had come to refer to the processed remains of Egyptian ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... On a typical day​ , John Henry Salter would rise to shoot wildfowl at dawn. A GP in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy for 65 years (he died in 1932, aged 91, while still working as the local doctor), he ministered to his patients in the morning, tended his dogs and plants in the afternoon, gave his evenings to committees, and seldom went to bed without completing his diary ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a learned country clergyman. Coleridge was an ‘anima naturaliter Christiana’, a mind born Christian, who said that the ‘strongest argument’ for Christianity is that it ‘fits the human heart’. It fitted his, at any rate. This was a period of religious crisis. After a generation or two, the visionary German painter Caspar David Friedrich set his ...”

“... Yes, sir, banknotes, the largest denomination that existed in France then, which was enormous.’ Christian Zervos is recollecting the day that Picasso took him, as a favoured confidant, to his vaults in the Banque de France. The fortune Zervos was allowed to glimpse in the mid-1930s had ridden out the Wall Street crash, and had been accumulating since before ...”

“... of the plot. Just don’t speak to the audience. I have always found this prohibition difficult. John Gielgud, who was in my first play, thought talking to the audience was vulgar. Then he was prevailed upon to try it and thereafter would seldom talk to anybody else. I understand this and even in my most naturalistic plays have contrived and relished the ...”