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“... of the great ‘samers’ of the later Middle Ages was the 14th-century travel writer known as Sir John Mandeville. Written close to home, somewhere in France, his vivid and readable travelogue is nonetheless animated by encounters with the unknown and unexpected: cyclopes, jewel-bearing vines, sheep the size of oxen, people who live under water and the ...”

“... Corbett examines his ethics and politics, appraising his magisterial synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian thought. John Took asks ‘why Dante matters’ and responds by casting him as an existentialist philosopher. And in a retrospective collection of nineteen essays, Zygmunt Barański addresses the state of Dante ...”

“... great traditions of philosophy ... Sometimes he would wander into irrelevant invectives against John Stuart Mill, who in a footnote had once referred to Bowen ... as ‘an obscure American’. It was Bowen who twenty years earlier had within two years of Mill’s publishing the Examination instituted an elective course at Harvard entirely devoted to it. In ...”

“... through the evangelical sub-culture of America. Their narratives abound with the exploits of Christian stunt women, Christian tee-shirt salesmen, Christian heavy metallists, Christian weight-watchers and ...”

“... Life of Huldrych Zwingli with a couplet: ‘Some talk of Martin Luther and some of Calvin (John)/But Zwingli’s hardly mentioned this side of Zollikon.’ Nevertheless, one can’t deny the truth of it. Potter’s admirable book piled up the evidence that would allow English-speakers to reassess Switzerland’s pioneer Reformer, but, nearly half a ...”

“... the ‘primal curse’, inflicted on humankind as a punishment for the Fall. Both classical and Christian orthodoxies informed early modern attitudes, so that the devoutly Protestant John Locke could assert on both counts that ‘labour for labour’s sake is against nature.’ There would be no work in heaven. But then ...”

“... In 1830 the prophet John Wroe asked his congregation of Christian Israelites in Ashton-under-Lyne for seven virgins to serve in his household. The Israelites had already built a Sanctuary and four gatehouses at Ashton, in the belief that the Lancashire cotton town was to be the site of the New Jerusalem ...”

“... sometimes baffling to the agnostic opponent, of condemning criticism he disagreed with as ‘neo-Christian’. The prefix suggests that indignant denials of Christian faith were merely evasive and would do you no good: you could be neo-Christian without being ...”

“... or Greek, written over three or four centuries by pagan members of the senatorial élite, by their Christian successors, and by representatives of all sorts of other points of view. When these monsters are tracked down to the ancient ‘sources’, it’s not surprising to find that the writers pretty well always write about other emperors, not their ...”

“... all going to die anyway. This is a weirdly literal-minded reading of the line, especially for a Christian, which is what Auden was by 1944; surely it refers to death-in-life, to other ways of being dead than the mere biological one? (We must love one another, or it will be as if we never lived.) Dropping a line from your official oeuvre, however, is not the ...”

“... of $3 million each, the prison makes little economic sense. But Republicans in Congress led by John McCain have said they’ll oppose him and have the numbers to do so. Dick Cheney appears on television, rather than in the dock, keeping the torture ‘debate’ alive. I wouldn’t have bet that diplomatic relations with Cuba would be restored before ...”

“... students with the casual self-assurance of an Ivy League professor. Outside her elegant classroom, Christian monks with Taliban-like beards swarm the streets. She has also been enlisted in other ideological battles. A Google search reveals her as an early feminist, a black martyr (she was Egyptian), and a lesbian icon (despite the fact that ancient sources ...”

“... at times as models of dedication to philosophical or political ideals, at times as examples of pre-Christian misguidedness about the meaning of death, though even Dante, so quick to condemn his fellow Florentines, saved the suicide Cato from his Inferno and made of him a judge of men. The authors of the histories, speeches and essays that featured such men ...”

“... supremely, and it cannot readily be transplanted elsewhere. In Russell’s version of liberalism, John Stuart Mill takes a central place. This may be the standard view, but it is not without its distortions. Historically, as Russell admits, liberalism came first, and Mill’s path from marginality to central cultural icon came much later. The Mill of On ...”

“... years later, as prime minister, he was sceptical about stories of Turkish atrocities against Christian insurgents in Bulgaria. He thought he recognised the same Evangelical propagandists and the same Evangelical hysteria and dismissed the reports as ‘coffee-house babble’. He stuck to Britain’s traditional policy (later inherited by Nato) of ...”