“... 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 ...”

“... Responding to East Germany’s claim that it possessed a superior social security system, Christian Democrats extended the West German system to benefit increasing numbers of people. These were also the decades when the National Health Service was created; when welfare projects like Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which promised cash benefits for ...”

“... What kept them going? Many sailors referred to comradeship as their finest memory of the Navy. William ‘Jock’ Batters (Plumber First Class) wrote in his unpublished memoir: When a sailor ‘belonged’ to a ship his main loyalty was to his ship and his mates. If they endured enough together, his family came second. How other can you explain the ...”

“... Dublin galleries. Cissie married Boss Sinclair, a Dublin antiques dealer and friend of the painter William Orpen; in the early 1920s the Sinclairs moved to Germany, where they dealt in contemporary German art, as well as antiques. Beckett often visited them there and became emotionally involved with their daughter, his first cousin Peggy, who died in 1933 of ...”

“... Arkansas and, of course, in the Shenandoah Valley, which Neely uses as one of his case studies. William Hyndman, an officer of a Pennsylvania regiment who had been kindly disposed towards the local population, ended up calling Mosby’s cavalry raiders whom civilians there protected ‘fetid decomposed humanity . . . the very scum of the foul wave of ...”

“... threatened, rescinded or enacted. In an unexpected consequence of the trade wars, the Evangelical Christian Publishers’ Association warns that tariffs on Chinese imports will greatly increase the cost of Bibles – most of which are printed in China – and cause ‘significant damage to Bible accessibility’.*The president tweets: ‘So interesting to see ...”

“... Messiah to return – or, in the Jewish version, to come for the first time. In both Jewish and Christian traditions, the motif of waiting for the Messiah sets the moral stage for a range of possibilities: everything from withdrawing from the world to making the world a better place for the Messiah to inhabit, as in Social Gospel Protestantism and Reform ...”

“... Ancient initiation rites and schizophrenic delusions. Freud, of course, but also Bergson, William James and Count Keyserling. Mandalas, yoga and the I Ching, plus warnings to the Western mind about becoming too deeply immersed in Eastern practices. Archetypes, psychological types and, regrettably, racial types. Wotan until the reader is woozy. And we ...”

“... of the poem suggests a quite dissimilar literary world, toughly at ease with its own brutalities. William Pritchard has written well on the vivacity the younger Larkin learned (with Auden, it has to be added, as a forerunner) from the playful rhythms and rememberable idioms of dance-music lyrics. His cool plotting and harshly humorous caricatures seem to me ...”

“... finished a screenplay, quite a good one, about the body-snatchers Burke and Hare. His friend William Empson remembered him speaking in detail about a film he wanted to make about the life of Dickens, ‘very profound and very box office’, as Empson remembered it, adding loyally: ‘If Dylan had lived a normal span of life it would have been likely to ...”

“... poses – and mapped out the habits of her subjects in lively detail. Despite the best efforts of Christian missionaries, Mead found American norms inverted in Samoa: there was no such thing as romantic love, adolescence was a smooth passage, virginity was not prized, premarital sex prevailed, there was something approaching no-fault divorce, and everybody ...”

“... had its adversaries: members of Reagan’s brains trust, meeting in 1980, declared it less Christian than Communist. ‘US policy,’ they said, ‘must begin to counter (not react against) . . . the "liberation theology” clergy.’ Aristide’s elevation from slum priest to presidential candidate took place against a background of right-wing death ...”

“... Edinburgh spinster called Christina Stewart bought land in Morvern, a peninsula south-west of Fort William, from the Duke of Argyll’s estates and soon afterwards evicted 135 people from their smallholdings to make way for two large sheep farms. Nothing suggests Miss Stewart ever visited Morvern or met her tenants, who resettled in Glasgow and became ...”

“... was the only Jewish household on their street – and after their marriage, Tress converted to Christian Science as a kind of halfway house. Newman thought his mother saw him as ‘a weapon of her Catholicism to be paraded in front of my father’s people as the royal vindication of her own family, her smartness, her genes’. He told Stern that he ...”

“... in New York earned just $1.12 a week, even lower than factory work.A pill compounder called Dr William Evans had premises on her street. Evans sold pills for everything from constipation to ‘low spirits’ to ‘hypochondriacism’ (this seems an especially clever wheeze). Evans has an air of Doctor Dulcamara in Donizetti’s 1832 opera L’Elisir ...”