“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... led to several investigations into an alleged shoot to kill policy, the most notable headed by John Stalker, then deputy chief constable of Manchester. Stalker’s inquiry was continually obstructed by elements within the RUC and he was eventually, and very controversially, dismissed from the police. The findings of his inquiry were never published. ‘I ...”

“... said on the radio: ‘I have a very lovely psychiatrist who works with me in my offices and his Christian background is that he tries to help homosexuals – trying to turn them away from what they are engaged in.’ This was the interview in which she caused outrage by calling homosexuality ‘an abomination’. The ‘lovely psychiatrist’ was not Selwyn ...”

“... In an author’s note to a second edition of the book, O’Connor described Hazel Motes as ‘a Christian malgré lui’. What is extraordinary about the story is the way she transforms her hero’s resistance to his religious destiny into a series of self-inflicted punishments that rival those suffered by early ...”

“... was their nature? Most important, could they be fitted into the universalist, no-rivals-allowed, Christian worldview? It was no good saying, ‘There’s no such thing as fairies.’ People knew different, clerics and lay alike. Theories about them proliferated, and their variety only demonstrates the intractability of the problem. The Beowulf poet claimed ...”

“... prospect that the strategy will change any time soon, for reasons that are well described by Christian Brose, though perhaps not in the way he intends. Brose, unlike the academic authors of other recent books on drones, is a denizen of the defence complex. Formerly staff director of the US Senate Armed Services Committee, which oversees the military ...”