“... at a theory of evolution. And it must in practice be more conducive to ‘kindness’ than the Christian myth that non-human animals had no immortal souls, with its contradictory corollary that there was nothing wrong in depriving them of the one, mortal life they have. In the twinkling of a page Mr Turner has reached ‘around 1600’, when ‘a few ...”

“... from the fact that, having been an active member of her father’s congregation and of the student Christian Union, she emerged from the war an atheist. The job of political secretary was a perfect fit for her. ‘She was really completely magnificent and we worked as one,’ Nancy Astor recalled. ‘I might describe it as my zeal and her brain, with the ...”

“... Wilson’s pre-eminent biographer, spoke for a majority of scholars in seeing him as essentially a Christian idealist, gripped by grand but unrealistic ideals, especially the League of Nations, whose rigid commitment to these ideals brought him enormous success but also ultimate failure. John Thompson offers us a different ...”

“... and was charged with deep meaning by many prelates and intellectuals. At Vatican II, John XXIII himself dwelt lovingly on the universality, antiquity and majesty of the Latin language, which Providence – so he argued – had led the Church to adopt. Catholics, then, were bombarded every Sunday with a form of Latin that came to be, in some ...”

“... was of course part of Eliot’s own journey towards a conservative (and at times cod-English) Christian identity. He underwent Anglican baptism the following year, and in 1928 reprinted the essay in a manifesto volume entitled For Lancelot Andrewes. In its preface he nailed his own colours to the mast as being (like his clerical hero) ‘classicist in ...”

“... and years was inherited from antiquity, but these units were shuffled into different shapes by the Christian calendar: the cycle of Advent, Nativity and Epiphany during the shortest days of the year – a time of renewal and rejoicing, according to Jacobus de Voragine – and the penitential progression between Easter and Pentecost, ‘a time of ...”

“... in Wheatley’s verse residues of African spiritual practices and memories of her birthplace. John Shields has argued that her elegies are compatible with African animist traditions, and proposes that her background was with the Fula people. Odell said Phillis described her mother pouring water ‘before the sun at his rising’, which has led some to ...”

“... murals to the Tate was an attempt to realise that ambition; to the same end, in 1964, he accepted John and Dominique de Menil’s commission to be the sole artist represented on the walls of a college chapel in Houston. The de Menils had already entrusted the design of the chapel to Johnson as part of his master plan for the University of St Thomas. The ...”

“... reach’: she is an excellent pianist; she knows her Shakespeare, her Adam Smith and her John Stuart Mill. Like Henry Perowne in Saturday, she is enlightened and honourable: a quietly heroic technocrat who brings ‘reasonableness to hopeless situations’, a liberal-paternalist superego figure who sorts things out sensibly, by compulsion if ...”

“... rejecting the idea of sin and proclaiming the innocence of a life freed from the yoke of ‘Christian stupidity’. He was thrown in prison, managed to escape, but a second arrest sealed his fate: in December 1512 he was burned at the stake in The Hague, along with his writings. Not long afterwards the Anabaptists emerged, with their ideas of ...”

“... fictive, prospective or real (floods, kidnappings, automobile accidents, the Beast of St John); fairy tales; shopping malls, hospitals, high street stores, dinner parties, graves. All these places and events can break people, or contain those who are broken. She can even put many of these things in the same poem. ‘Sensual Pleasures’ (another new ...”

“... It was a bonus that these latter prisoners were exposed to the regular attentions of nearby Christian mission stations, while learning – so the administrators reasoned – the necessary discipline of productive work. Of course, the most celebrated British example of enforced colonial labour and imagined redemption involved the territories that ...”

“... best-selling writers, their business is not in the main literary, and in 1972 the prizewinner, John Berger, made a speech in which he expressly deplored what he regarded as the exploitative nature of the donor’s principal interest; indeed he gave half his prize to a revolutionary movement. Other writers have shown some embarrassment but have not, so far ...”

“... on the down escalator at nine o’clock in the morning. When the Number 30 passed a statue of John F. Kennedy in Marylebone Road, a teenager looked up at his mother. ‘It all started with him,’ he said. ‘I know what you mean,’ his mother said. ‘He was the first to get this amount of coverage.’ In Regent’s Park rows of old ladies were sitting ...”

“... Ziolkowski says, he unthinkingly obeys the protocol of courtly etiquette, and thereby forgets the Christian imperative of charity. Arguably, he has repressed the instinct of compassion; in that sense, he is inhibited. But Parzival is a gormless hero, not a hesitant one. He doesn’t ask himself: ‘What should I do?’ He just sits there like a ...”