“... More insidious still was the Catholic appropriation of history. Between 1819 and 1830 the Catholic priest John Lingard published an eight-volume History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans to the Accession of William and Mary, using sources inaccessible to Protestants. The four volumes on the 16th century were contrived, as Lingard admitted, to ...”

“... that prospective martyrs, suffering for the faith, could remit sins more surely than any bishop or priest. In this light, Perpetua’s certainty that her prayers will liberate the unbaptised Dinocrates from his place of darkness, torment and thirst, and enable him to drink and bathe in inexhaustible streams of water, takes on a more than merely personal ...”

“... the masses had only been waiting for a signal to pour into the streets and head for the palaces. Christopher Clark uses a metaphor from nuclear physics for the way the revolution accelerated: From the beginning of March 1848, it becomes impossible to trace the revolutions as a linear sequence from one theatre of turbulence to the next. We enter the fission ...”

“... of royal power, have despised or caricatured Wolsey as ‘a royal favourite and a meddlesome priest’. Fertile as Gwyn’s challenge to that picture is, it has to be said that, like many critics of Protestant and Whig historiography, he does not define it carefully or explain its development and influence across the generations, so that we are left to ...”

“... episode. His sole subject, he says, will be the wrath of Achilles, and he starts on about some priest of Apollo you have never heard of and some squalid dispute over rights to a female prisoner-of-war. At this rate you will be down at the beach tomorrow morning looking for a boat home. You catch the eye of your host; he is looking rather anxious. There ...”

“... the issue of genre with questions of biography. Given the fates that overtook his colleagues Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd in 1593 and 1594 – the one stabbed to death at 29, the other eventually dying after an extensive and painful interrogation – you could argue that Shakespeare might have felt that he had been living on borrowed time since the ...”

“... gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back?’ He is persistent and independent; when his father, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church, bans him from the library to stop him ruining his eyesight, Tesla retreats to his bedroom and casts his own candles so that he can read in secret at night. He is brave and quick-thinking; when a fire-engine, drawing water ...”

“... dons Nevill Coghill and Lord David Cecil, the Oxford doctor Humphrey Havard, and a Dominican priest, Gervase Mathew. Tolkien inducted his son Christopher, later a lecturer in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English at Oxford, and the editor of his father’s copious Nachlass. His enduring achievement was to draw the maps for ...”

“... further than most in making sense of the society emerging from the ruins. This was no easy task. Christopher Clark’s recent history of 1848, Revolutionary Spring, shows that most Europeans experienced the preceding decades as a time of ‘flux and transition’. In France, a number of different political futures seemed possible. Some of these were ...”

“... in New York, is filmed in LA, deprives us of the visual possibilities of Manhattan itself. But Christopher Manley, the series cinematographer, does grand things with light. At one point in season two as Don prepares to leave his corner office, the strong late afternoon sunlight, full of optimism and the promise of reward, stripes his face through the ...”

“... life under Nero, c.27-66 AD) and the Golden Ass by the great orator, neo-Platonist philosopher, priest and magistrate Apuleius (c.123-180 AD), give us some of our best evidence as to how the dominant Romans felt about the slaves they lived with, needed, used and owned. The Golden Ass includes the most sustained narrative from the perspective of the ...”

“... for the early poems of Pasternak, whose father was a well-known artist, and Hingley refers to Christopher Barnes’s suggestion that the painting of the Expressionist school – Munch, Kandin-sky, possibly Chagall – seeped sideways, as it were, into the young poet’s vision, Where the air is as blue as a bundle of clothing In the arms of a patient ...”

“... poems do: they only chart the results of asking questions like these, bringing        the priest and the doctor In their long coats Running over the fields. In this way, ‘Days’, though it has larger and more interesting ends in view, throws some light on the odd gaps between ‘life’ and ‘literature’, and on the always obscure and tangled ...”

“... beStill the indomitable Irishry.Yeats died on 28 January 1939. Two days earlier, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had arrived in New York. When Auden heard of Yeats’s death, he sought to ascertain what time of the day or night he had died. He was planning a poem. What preoccupied him most in 1939 was guilt that his gift for poetry was serving ...”

“... far likelier to comply.’ This is almost exactly the scenario laid out by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas in his 1995 article ‘The Structure of Evil’ when he describes the ‘psychic death’ or ‘radical infantilisation’ that the serial killer imposes on his victim: ‘With the total collapse of trust and the madness expressed by sudden ...”