“... 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 ...”

“... summoned. His lofty earlier debates on the Agony in the Garden and Cain and Abel with his friend John Colet would have remained unknown – Colet was not one to rush into print – if Erasmus had not written them up and got them into circulation. If Colet’s new St Paul’s School was known abroad, it was Erasmus’s doing. Even Jean Vitrier, coming to ...”

“... between themselves and the pagan world.’ Parallels can indeed be found between much of Christian teaching and the sentiments of virtuous pagans in late antiquity, but this emphasis, and especially the Augustinian doctrine that all sexual activity without exception was tainted by the fall and could be seen as a paradigm of sin in general, brought in ...”

“... of pathetic, docile subservience and black inferiority’. The motto, or slogan, ‘echoed both Christian beliefs in the equality of mankind before God and enlightened theories of natural law’, as Honour observes, but it cannot be considered so congenial to white philanthropists’ conviction of their superiority. Brotherhood – fraternité, – soon ...”

“... should be excluded from schools. Intolerance is institutionalised; it is the ordinary language of Christian fundamentalists, and fundamentalists are the human infrastructure of the southern United States. Or so it seems at first blush. Tennessee is a small state with an ignominious past. In 1860, one quarter of its population were slaves and the slave-trade ...”

“... the ‘licensed harlots’ neatly positioned between the European soldiers’ lines and the native Christian church. Dyer also unearthed an indiscreet document of the officer commanding the Second Cheshire Regiment, suitably headed in military jargon ‘Requisition for Extra Attractive Women for Regimental Bazar (Soldiers)’, in which the Ambala cantonment ...”