“... of creation. This is a version of the Arian heresy which rumbled through the early centuries of Christian thought. Complex doctrinal positions beginning with ‘A’ were a Miltonic speciality, since his views on salvation were more or less Arminian. Where Calvin believed that God predestined the damned and the saved to hell or to heaven from the beginning ...”

“... in his pantheon of practitioners, but Dillon’s responsiveness is wide, to Virginia Woolf, to William Gass, to Susan Sontag, to Lester Bangs and to Roland Barthes (his first and most important inspiration). Most practitioners regard essay-writing as a sideline – Davenport set store by his stories, so much less vital than his non-fictional prose – but ...”

“... William Ewart Gladstone​ , four times prime minister of Great Britain and Ireland, died of a cancer of the palate on the 19th of May 1898. Ascension Day. It was fitting, Bill’s father said, for a Christian gentleman. It was at moments like these, he thought, when you could detect a pattern in the world ...”

“... the trees. Like all students of Roosevelt, Black draws on the work of pioneering scholars such as William Leuchtenburg, Frank Freidel and Arthur Schlesinger, but he also incorporates a large amount of original material from the Roosevelt Library. And although Black credits a number of research assistants, the argument bears his personal stamp. For ...”

“... not really in place. More important is Davie’s status as the don’s poet, or the don as poet. William Empson was never that, was indeed rather positively committed to his own version of the English metaphysical manner, a manner as blunt and accessible as in Herbert’s poetry or Aubrey’s prose. As Bernard Bergonzi shows in an acute and learned ...”

“... one of those who care a great deal for the writers of Eastern Europe, and the experiments of William Carlos Williams and the Beats. I’d first met him when I was a student myself, in the Eighties, when travelling across America by car seemed like the right sort of thing to be doing. There was a gang of us then, and we got jobs working in pizza places or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”