“... the most written about poet of our time – over three thousand items, Pierre Joris reckons. John Felstiner’s book is of inestimable value to anyone wanting to read Celan with understanding. It provides a sort of triple deal, giving a rudimentary narrative of the life, and combining this with translations and brilliant readings of maybe four or five ...”

“... Mark Griffiths: his elaborately illustrated essay, ‘Face to Face with Shakespeare’, focused on John Gerard’s well-known Elizabethan manual of botany, The Herball or, General Historie of Plantes, and purported to demonstrate that one of the four seemingly allegoric figures on its ornamental title-page – a figure clad in a Roman costume and crowned with ...”

“... John Carey’s new book, like his last one, The Intellectuals and the Masses, is a little swizzle-stick perfectly designed for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable, wise and often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities ...”

“... the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Donald Trump’s (then) chief of staff, John Kelly, went on Fox News and delivered a history lesson. ‘The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.’ Kelly’s ...”

“... remained – but the style of commitment was transformed. On New Year’s Day 1839, the Rev. John Rayner Stephens spoke to a Chartist rally on Newcastle’s Town Moor. There were about forty thousand angry people at the meeting. Stephens declared himself ‘a revolutionist by fire, a revolutionist by blood, to the knife, to the death’. If the hated new ...”

“... to our understanding of those tendencies than she thinks. It is from Calvin’s institutes of the Christian Religion that Manning derives what she calls the ‘puritan-provincial vision’, a world-view characterised by its embrace of contradictory absolutes: the innocence of faith and the torments of self-examination, acceptance of arbitrary predestination ...”

“... lawyers, dentists, pharmacists, teachers; and his mother’s family were highly respectable Christian men and women, ‘self-righteous’ non-drinkers, non-smokers, non-gamblers. It is a point of Gates’s memoir that despite national social upheaval in the Sixties, Piedmont coloured did not lose their identities and sense of worth; the boy Skip was ...”

“... the cardinal principle of Islam, had been perverted into a celebration of Love, watchword of the Christian religion which, in Islam, is considered to be notoriously lax when it comes to adultery (‘Go thou and sin no more’ as against 80 lashes, or even death by stoning). The loves of the Troubadours, Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura may all have ...”

“... worth noting that all three are childless and parentful: all three have been devoted to Protestant Christian parents and have (to my regret) firmly rejected the faith of their fathers. Jennie Lee’s new book, My Life with Nye, is a valuable personal footnote to Foot’s public life of Bevan, adding some of the private matter which Bevan’s widow may ...”

“... traditional community of young Polish Jews. The last chapter, set just before a picture of Pope John Paul II praying at the Heroes of the Ghetto Monument in Warsaw, carries an interview with Szymon Datner PhD, vice-president of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland and the author of 15 books on German crimes in Poland and the fate of the Jews. He calls ...”

“... and Hassall the authorised biography in 1964 – though Delany’s bibliography puts it in 1972. John Lehmann’s sympathetic debunking biography of 1980 gets into the bibliography but not into the text. Delany’s Neo-Pagan era begins in 1907 towards the end of Brooke’s first year at Cambridge. Brooke had won a scholarship to King’s College from stuffy ...”

“... apparently not too appealing fact. As someone who also comes from a Protestant minority within a Christian minority within an enormously powerful Muslim Arab majority, I can instinctively understand both the pressures that produce people like Ian Paisley (in my case, my Lebanese Protestant relations who identified with the Phalanges Libanaises, the Jumayyil ...”

“... the Ottoman-controlled Aegean. In the years that preceded the founding of Jamestown in Virginia, John Smith had fought Ottoman armies in Eastern Europe and spent time as an Ottoman captive. It’s no surprise, then, that many of the conceptual frameworks that European colonisers applied to the Americas derived from their encounters with Muslims at home: they ...”

“... Victorian classicist Sabine Baring-Gould, for instance, who wrote the words to the hymn ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, rhapsodised over an eagle-nosed bust in the British Museum, admiring its ‘sweet, sad, patient smile, the reserve of power in the lips, and that far-off look into the heavens’. Quoting Baring-Gould and other devotees of the same ...”

“... and probably convinced Graham to take up the subject. The aesthetic coherence of the Shakers – a Christian sect founded in England in the 1740s and transplanted to the American north-east – resonated with artists who were drawn to an elegant and entranced minimalism. A Shaker rocking chair ‘with a bone-like simplicity of line’ (Graham’s ...”