“... 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 ...”

“... made us realise how much poorer we are if Jefferson, Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Stowe, Peirce, William James, Santayana and Dewey are not familiar landmarks in our intellectual scenery. And his devotion to the United States as the original anti-imperialist polity and the most enduring democratic utopia, as the land of many nations, of anti-slavery and the ...”

“... with those who wanted to be safe accepting they were chained to a higher power. For the delegates, Christian faith is a form of specialness – the backbone of the ‘American exceptionalism’ we would hear about all week – and its lessons seemed clear. It meant that God would protect them, as he protected Trump from the wicked shooter. God was very much in ...”

“... 1991 – in London the father worked as a volunteer for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. At the William Morris Academy in Hammersmith, where she was a pupil, Heshu repeatedly expressed her fear of a forced marriage, but teachers ignored her. When her parents discovered her relationship with a Christian Lebanese boy, she ...”

“... treatment of religion and a Harlem only barely understood south of 125th Street, was compared to William James and William Faulkner. In Paris in 1950 Baldwin had read A Portrait of the Artist and its hero’s story was not lost on him. The need to do battle with religion and his own oppressed nation, some of whose members ...”

“... magistrate from Luxembourg rounded out the set.Among the next levy of judges were a founder of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Berlin, later a deputy for the party in the Bundestag; the son of a leader of the Anti-Revolutionary Party (Calvinist) in the Netherlands; a former aide to Dino Grandi, minister of justice for the Duce, and brother of the then ...”

“... in London. Contact with Hale eventually resumed. In 1927 he told a friend (a fellow American, William Force Stead): ‘I had a letter from a girl in Boston this morning whom I have not seen or heard from for years and years. It brought back something to me that I had not known for a long time.’ In October 1930 she came to tea in London. Vivien liked her ...”

“... at what Wordsworth called ‘getting and spending’. His phrasing sometimes sounds rather like William Blake, whose name and example as a London poet crops up quite a lot, or like Coleridge at his most indignant: this is a story of native genius held in thrall by the hostile forces of trade – what Hill refers to at one point, in a Poundian spirit, as the ...”

“... was not the only contemporary to wonder in retrospect at the Auden effect – what the painter William Coldstream called ‘a real magic and glamour in his presence’ – and shrewdly put his finger on part of it: the figure Auden cut was at once impressive and comical, as though acting out some great running joke about authority or seriousness. He strode ...”

“... on 245 calories a day. This is what Benjamin Netanyahu describes as ‘the victory of Judaeo-Christian civilisation against barbarism’.The military operation in Gaza has altered the shape, perhaps even the meaning, of the struggle over Palestine – it seems misleading, and even offensive, to refer to a ‘conflict’ between two peoples after one of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”