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“... addresses himself to these large topics is not, so to speak, the Gellner who at present holds the William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology at Cambridge, but the Gellner who was for many years a professor of philosophy in the Sociology Department at the LSE. Gellner the anthropologist knows very well that to summarise the evolution of mankind in terms of a ...”

“... has a specific history in German Romanticism. It is a delusion which Peter Paret and especially William Vaughan are quite ready to take for reality, while Norman Stone’s own dreams about ‘the positive qualities of Hitler, his real achievements’ (thus Professor J.H. Plumb’s Introduction) aid and abet it: if Hitler was some sort of genius, he is part ...”

“... however, has shown that it was installed around the year 1189. It was paid for, we now know, by William Marshal, first Earl of Pembroke, who rose from relative obscurity to become regent for the young Henry III and one of the most powerful men in Europe. Marshal’s craftsmen used fast-grown trees for the door’s outer face and a powerful lattice of ...”

“... Reformation, The Stripping of the Altars, they have now made things even with David Daniell’s William Tyndale. Tyndale’s life is soon told. He was born, probably in 1494, of a landowning and entrepreneurial family in that part of Gloucestershire where the Cotswolds meet the Severn, since then the home of Evelyn Waugh (temporarily: the ghost of Tyndale ...”

“... along the coast. Only two weeks after Edward’s Canterbury lance-fest the archbishop of York, William Zouche, wrote to his priests: ‘There can be no one who does not know, since it is now public knowledge, how great a mortality, pestilence and infection of the air are now threatening various parts of the world, and especially England.’Did Edward and ...”

“... To ask me to check my Christian beliefs at the public door is to ask me to expel the Holy Spirit from my life when I serve as a congressman,’ declares Mark Souder, a conservative Republican from Indiana, ‘and that I will not do.’ Such affirmations of the legitimacy of religion in the civic sphere are increasingly common in the United States, even among liberal democrats stung by accusations of secularist bias ...”

“... original characters. In among the sentences are the curses and commands of invading Teutons. In William Weaver’s translation there is a hint of Molesworth – the young cynic is just getting by in Latin culture, his canniness a substitute for learning. Yet in that greeting to the pygmies Eco has encoded a knowing little allusion. No doubt there were many ...”

“... contain no less than 52 tractates, some in duplicate, all of them apparently Gnostic, the majority Christian if usually unorthodox in character, a few pagan; together, they comprise a substantial Gnostic library that probably belonged to a monastic foundation. Apart from two codices, also in Coptic, which had been known to scholars for some time and which ...”

“... Land dissolves in its last few lines, and of writing ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ rather than a Christian platitude like ‘the peace that passeth understanding’. It is the strangeness that counts, of the belief itself as much as of language, the insistence on something unrecognisable to set against the natural turpitude of the self. In his early years in ...”

“... is marked. The message is even spelled out for the inattentive: Faraday belonged to a small Christian sect, the Sandemanians, and ‘believed firmly that in studying science he was investigating the laws written into the Universe by God.’ This is not the stuff of which arresting exhibitions are usually made. But if Geoffrey Cantor is right in his ...”

“... dismayed suggestion that there is a ‘strange contradiction between the faith and practice of the Christian world’. Donoghue has ‘never understood why people hate Christianity, especially people who express shock at the least trace of anti-semitism’ – which distracts from the thought that anti-semitism has been, among other things, ...”

“... respect and was even displayed in the Louvre when Napoleon was planning to follow the example of William the Conqueror; also that Carlyle’s condemnation of heartless capitalism was prompted by Jocelin de Brakelond’s 12th-century chronicle. But the best example of this dialogue between past and present is the way that the destruction of ancient monuments ...”

“... Off and on, for over half a century, William Gaddis worked on a manuscript about the short life of the player piano in the United States. Over fifty years on an outmoded entertainment? There is more here than meets the eye: ‘Agapē Agape is a satirical celebration of the conquest of technology and of the place of art and the artist in a technological democracy,’ Gaddis wrote in a proposal from the early 1960s ...”

“... The basic answer offered to the unstated second question is: ‘Living as we do in an originally Christian culture, we see ourselves as a mixture of flesh and spirit.’ The word ‘mixture’ can be unpacked in various ways, as we gradually learn. Porter, who knows all about 18th-century medicine, naturally chooses to lay his emphasis on the part played in ...”

“... principalities of ‘Outremer’ was a simple and familiar one. It required for its defence a Christian population which its natural resources were inadequate to support. The huge army which conquered Jerusalem in 1099 had come to see the Holy Sepulchre and, having seen it, its members dispersed and went home. A rump remained behind to colonise the ...”