“... 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 ...”

“... Socialist and Communist Parties, social democrats and a leftist faction that had split from the Christian Democrats, he had more than a million. The alliance was called Popular Unity, echoing the earlier Popular Front, but Allende made it clear that what Chileans meant by democracy had changed since the 1930s: ‘We do not want a repetition of the Popular ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an eating insecurity, a covetous desire to earn acceptance and approval from those in authority. John Sutherland points to this paradox as the driving force behind Mary Ward’s extraordinary career. He isn’t inclined to condone the various obstinacies that made ‘The Great Mary’ (Pound’s term) so scorned among the writers who followed her. Her moral ...”

“... big event (and even the Serie A game between Roma and Inter postponed to the following day). Pope John Paul II is to celebrate a televised mass in St Peter’s, and then travel down to San Giovanni Rotondo to celebrate Mass there. The millions of pellegrini in attendance are to be transported by more than five thousand coaches (100 from Poland alone) and 19 ...”

“... racial politics as a weapon. One ideology sees a free, democratic Britain, united by a common Christian culture and important traditions and values – a pretty good place on the whole. Criticism of it is fair enough, since criticism is part of free speech, but it should not degenerate into demands for revolution or even social engineering. This Britain ...”

“... unfavourable impression’.O’Connor’s ideas about her writing were unambiguous. In a letter to John Lynch, a reviewer and an academic at Notre Dame, in 1955, she says: ‘I feel that if I were not a Catholic, I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason ever to feel horrified.’ She described herself as a ‘hillbilly Thomist’: like ...”

“... because almost anyone can be accused of ‘association’, including the slew of former Christian Democrat politicians who have been charged and prosecuted. The most prominent Sicilian politician, the former minister (multiple times) and later senator Calogero Mannino was tried several times on that charge before his case finally reached the ...”

“... geology would amplify or clarify the biblical account. In this way, one could be both a devout Christian and a scientist, as William Buckland and Adam Sedgwick, the two leading British geologists of the 19th century, were. Of course, biblical literalism resurged periodically, notably in the US. But the majority of scientists just got on with their ...”

“... in print, the stories had been circulating for centuries, crossing the borders between the Christian and Islamic worlds, and commuting fluently between tongue and pen. The many narrative tributaries first came together in a single stream when the French scholar and antiquarian Antoine Galland used a 14th or 15th-century Syrian manuscript he had brought ...”

“... behind. The humanitarian empire is the new face of an old figure: the democratic free world, the Christian West. In the immediate aftermath of 11 September, even after the invasion of Afghanistan, it was plausible to argue this, but since the invasion of Iraq it has become unsustainable. For all Blair’s supine support for the war, London seems to have ...”

“... It was very unfair to those young men.’ John Henry Newman’s conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 shattered the intellectual credit of the Oxford Movement. The long struggle – first from the pulpit of the University Church of St Mary, later through the radical pages of Tracts for the Times – to state the case for the Apostolic authority of the Anglican church had ended, as the Movement’s critics had always predicted, in total surrender to Catholic dogma ...”

“... day: Palmerston, Macaulay, Charles Darwin and Annabella Milbanke. In her twenties she came to know Christian von Bunsen, the Prussian ambassador in London, founder of a Protestant hospital in Rome and a German one in London, staffed by deaconesses from a Lutheran establishment at Kaiserswerth, near Düsseldorf. Although Nightingale’s chosen vocation was ...”