“... an instance of ‘Neo-Christianity’, meaning that it was an attempt to show you could still be a Christian without believing anything in the old way. Clearly Positivism was superior to this ignominy. The review attracted much attention, as did Harrison’s forthright views on other matters. Like Mill, he wanted to bring Governor Eyre to trial for murdering ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a hand upon them and would have been indignant if anyone had made the familiar imputation – as William Cory and Oscar Browning were at Eton when their open interest in good looks was rewarded by the headmaster’s request that they resign from the staff. Benson published Cory’s poems and translations (‘They told me, Heraclitus’), which, together with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Dooey, is known as the Scratchings and is the site of a vanished settlement of the early Christian era. As a child in the Fifties I’d go out with friends and find horses’ teeth, packed oyster, mussel and clam shells, then sometimes bronze and iron pins, bits of ancient Celtic jewellery. One hot afternoon I uncovered a charred piece of wood with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... concentrate the universe in themselves,’ the Chilean liberal Francisco Bilbao complained after William Walker’s 1856 invasion of Nicaragua, where he brought back slavery years after it had been abolished: ‘The Yankee replaces the American; Roman patriotism, philosophy; wealth, morality; and self-interest, justice.’ When Washington attempted, at the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the book in a prison cell – he’d been charged with placing a bomb in the headquarters of the Christian Democrats in Bologna. By spring 1977 Bifo was leading a movement that, in his own words, ‘was more inspired by Dadaism and Anti-Oedipus than by political revolutionary manuals’. When Guattari came to Bologna that autumn to attend a far left ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is better because a working place still and with a good museum of monumental masonry, early Christian altar pieces, Roman gravestones and beneath it a labyrinth of arcaded passages that ran under the old Roman forum. The Musée Arlaten, on the other hand, is rather creepy, the walls crowded with primitive paintings of grim females, Arlésiennes ...”

“... 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 ...”