“... student to find out what her invitation referred to, and accepted it only when she learned that William James had been there before her, with his Varieties of Religious Experience). The lectures were subsequently put together, after her death in 1975, by Mary McCarthy, as The Life of the Mind. The question that crops up, unstated, throughout Elizabeth Young ...”

“... other in important respects. Partly at least, this reflected the difference in ethos between the Christian denominations to which the majorities in the two areas gave their allegiance. In the North, quite apart from a desire to maintain and indeed intensify the Protestant character of society in the area, there was a deep fear of the Nationalist minority ...”

“... We could find ourselves spinning back into some atavistic nightmare or testing the rhetoric of the Christian apocalypse; Cohn speaks of the unprivileged masses turning towards Sibylline oracles (such as Mandelson’s obscure Cabinet Office pronouncements). ‘The Johannine tradition,’ he writes, ‘tells of one warrior-saviour who is to appear in the Last ...”

“... them as a key to the hieroglyphs. They were actually written in Greek, not Egyptian, and in the Christian era, not under the ancient dynasties of the pharaohs, as Isaac Casaubon, the Huguenot Hellenist, had demonstrated with depressing finality much earlier, in 1614. Kircher was oblivious: he never realised that genuine obelisks had stood at royal tombs, or ...”

“... sensibility in her fiction. Forbearance, gratitude, humility and an obligation towards others – Christian virtues – are meant to compensate for our shortcomings. Even the restless, selfish Wilmet, eventually recognises that life is ‘a glass of blessings’ – the title of the novel she appears in. (The quotation is borrowed from George Herbert, one of ...”

“... clear how the figure was powered, but according to an account by the 16th-century antiquarian William Lambarde it was able to ‘bow down and lifte up it selfe, to shake and stirre the handes and feete, to nod the head, to rolle the eies, to wag the chaps, to bende the browes’.How did medieval and early modern audiences perceive such creations? Todd and ...”

“... Though biscuits could be mass-produced, breadmaking was, as Marx put it in Capital, still ‘pre-Christian’. In 1892 a leatherworker told the Royal Commission on Labour that ‘I do not think you will ever get machinery into our trade until you can grow all the animals of one size with just the same blemishes.’ Many trades, like building, expanded output ...”

“... and refine this recruitment strategy with the devshirme, the ‘harvest’ of young boys from Christian families in the Balkans and southern Russia, who would be taken to Istanbul, converted to Islam and trained for careers in the army (as Janissaries), the palace or the bureaucracy. The key principle was that the army should not be recruited from the ...”

“... The actual book he is using is also identified: the edition from the Paris printing house of Christian Wechel. And Pound might have added, as he tells us elsewhere, that he acquired the volume in a bookstall in Paris in the early years of the century, probably in 1908. In fact, Pound’s ‘gloss’ cannot act as a gloss unless it is itself glossed in ...”

“... I would have had the watchers out on St Paul for a long time if I had been in charge of the Christian secret service when he came blundering into Damascus yelling that he’d gone blind, and Christ was the Messiah.’ Railton does his work only too well and on the last page we see one of his younger kinsmen, who disappeared in 1917 in Soviet Russia with ...”

“... not really in place. More important is Davie’s status as the don’s poet, or the don as poet. William Empson was never that, was indeed rather positively committed to his own version of the English metaphysical manner, a manner as blunt and accessible as in Herbert’s poetry or Aubrey’s prose. As Bernard Bergonzi shows in an acute and learned ...”

“... one of those who care a great deal for the writers of Eastern Europe, and the experiments of William Carlos Williams and the Beats. I’d first met him when I was a student myself, in the Eighties, when travelling across America by car seemed like the right sort of thing to be doing. There was a gang of us then, and we got jobs working in pizza places or ...”

“... ancestor. For Burke insists that much of our inheritance, from classical antiquity, from the Christian Fathers and from the great lawyers of the Renaissance, requires that we cannot be indifferent to the sufferings of our fellow men anywhere in the world. Hard-hearted pseudo-realism is incompatible with Burkean sympathies. For again and again, he ...”

“... of public business or its reductive impact on his imagination. In the mid-18th century the poet William Mason, like Marvell a native of Hull, proudly remembered how after 1660 Marvell’s ‘daring genius’ rose to ‘loftier heights’ than ‘beauty’s praise, or plaint of slighted love’, and ‘led the war’ against ‘freedom’s foes’. By the ...”

“... of creation. This is a version of the Arian heresy which rumbled through the early centuries of Christian thought. Complex doctrinal positions beginning with ‘A’ were a Miltonic speciality, since his views on salvation were more or less Arminian. Where Calvin believed that God predestined the damned and the saved to hell or to heaven from the beginning ...”