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“... the young Olivier, though he ‘should look to his gait, which smacks too much of the modern prize-ring’, and he ought not to have jumped on the dining-table – ‘too much in Hamlet’s vein’. Still, Agate admired ‘a cold Irvingesque malignity’ in the voice and in twenty years’ time Olivier would play the role better. ‘Whereas a stripling can fly ...”

“... aberrations’. Not everyone was seduced: Rimbaud was indifferent; Tolstoy denounced the Ring cycle as ‘counterfeit art’; a discombobulated Ruskin left a performance of Die Meistersinger claiming the music was ‘clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded … sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless’. Matthew Arnold and ...”

“... tunic, but on a napkin around his neck. He wears what looks from a distance to be a solid gold ring, the marker of a Roman knight, but turns out to be gilt, inlaid with little iron stars. Just like the members of the imperial family, or any self-respecting senator, he is a phenomenal self-publicist, but the kinds of achievement that are inscribed and ...”

“... is bitterly offensive about Jesus in particular and Christians in general. Jerusalem remained a Christian city for some three hundred years. Fortunately, its Muslim conquerors had a more civilised attitude to the other two religions than either of them had to the other. Jerusalem is holy to the Muslims, ranking after Mecca and Medina, because of ...”

“... When Lean graduated, Lewis took it over. The group was for men only. (Dorothy L. Sayers, a keen Christian and an admirer of Lewis, was excluded.) At first, meetings were held in Lewis’s Magdalen sitting room on Thursday evenings. Members drank tea and beer, argued about the meaning of life and read their latest work to each other. Then they also began to ...”

“... and strangled. Rebus – 41-year-old drinker, ex-soldier, failed husband, absentee father, Christian, annual rereader of Crime and Punishment – begins receiving a series of cryptic notes. The first few messages say There are clues everywhere. Then a message is delivered to Rebus’s home: For those who read between the times. It becomes clear that ...”

“... in fact quite high. All that is needed is a challenger to take conservative voters away from the Christian Democrat/Christian Social Union bloc, or a further fall in the vote of the Free Democrats, Merkel’s junior coalition partners, which drops them below 5 per cent and so out of the Bundestag. Then the way would open ...”

“... Although it echoed his tough-guy slang about their Paris-Chicago romance, the phrase has the ring of feminist fable. Like Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid, whose story Beauvoir wept over as a child, the frog wife is a changeling, unlike other women; pebbly and awkward, she cannot wed the prince. She is only ...”

“... Smith – another headmaster of Westminster – did, at the end of the 18th century. He felled the ring-leader with a club. Dr John Rae, the author of this book and the present incumbent of the post held by Busby and Smith, assuredly has no thought of reviving past brutalities, though he admits, understandably enough, to thinking that some boys involved in ...”

“... formidable polemical content. But he did see the apparent contradiction between a dedication to Christian apologetics and that declared wellspring of his writing in spontaneous concatenations of pictures and images: floating islands and fauns with umbrellas and parcels. His resolution of this difficulty consists in making a distinction between the Author ...”

“... empire on Europe’s southern and eastern borders, they must have looked like the saviours of Christian civilisation. In 1496 that worldly sophisticate Pope Alexander VI recognised this by awarding Catherine’s parents the title of ‘Catholic Monarchs’. Shrewd dynastic marriages for their children linked the Catholic Monarchs to the rulers of ...”

“... Oxbridge debating society: it is at once over-heated and un-serious, and has a sort of neighing ring to it, as of a clash of young geldings. At his best, Paul Johnson’s writing rises above this – for example, his picture of how the 1983 Labour Manifesto came to be written: ‘The absurd policy document ... which reads as though it was written by a covey ...”

“... Dr Coomaraswamy. When at length they were able to marry, it was with ‘a pale gold wedding ring made for us at Campden’, and a meal in a vegetarian restaurant at sixpence a head. This was the Simple Life in passionate action. Mairet was the son of a Swiss watchmaker settled in London. In later years he acted at the Old Vic, worked as a farm ...”

“... paradise as Havana before 1959. The disparities of wealth and the polarisation of politics – the Christian fascists, the Phalange, had been around long before 1948 – meant that Lebanese society was unstable in a way Swiss society never was. Lebanon was, moreover, a ‘fake’ state, the result of post-colonial realignment, a hodge-podge detached from Syria ...”

“... all had it coming first by a mile.And it all gets stranger. Next month, The Fellowship of the Ring, the first in a three-part movie adaptation of Tolkien’s masterwork, will have a worldwide release. Unlike the last attempt, Ralph Bakshi’s peculiar semi-animated version of 1978, this new production is a proper live-action global-Hollywood movie, with ...”