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“... Yet contemporaries were convinced that the problem of atheism was both pervasive and growing. As Thomas Nashe put it, ‘there is no Sect now in England so scattered as Atheisme.’ The Spanish ambassador, Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count of Gondomar, reported in 1617 that some 900,000 people (more than a quarter of England’s estimated population), were ...”

“... to the paper’s opinion pages, as did a strange young man who had changed his name from Keith Ashworth to Perri 6. Hacks have a strong craft consciousness: they regard all senior editors who have not proved they are tough enough to cover hard news as effete and overpaid timewasters who will bring ruin on a newspaper. To make matters worse for the ...”

“... became orthodoxy for men like Dod, Cleaver, Bradshaw. Hildersham, Baynes, Sibbes, Preston. Thomas Hooker and Ames. Dr Kendall sums up: ‘we are saved by grace, we are assured by works. Other writers above have implied this: Sibbes says it.’ Assurance is ‘a reward of exact walking’. Men should ‘labour to be such as God may love us’. This is ...”

“... claim true. But it is a safe inference that his views on the question diverge from those of Thomas Jefferson. What, if anything, does make the claim simply true must be the rationally-interpreted place of human beings within the order (or disorder) of nature. If all human beings do simply have rights, that is to say, these rights must be natural ...”

“... Avenue Bridge, where John Berryman jumped to his death; the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas supposedly drank the 18 whiskeys that killed him; 23 Fitzroy Road, where Plath laid her head on a folded towel in the gas oven; Missolonghi, per Byron; Rome, to the Keats-Shelley House; Vienna, where Auden bore out his own prophecy: ‘I shall probably die ...”

“... in 1902 into a relatively prosperous middle-class family; his father was a bank inspector. Like Thomas Lovell Beddoes, an earlier oddball of British poetry, he was sent to Charterhouse School; he can’t have enjoyed it much, for when he was 16 he ran away to London, naively hoping to establish himself as a journalist. This bid for independence lasted all ...”

“... Teresa. A World Full of Gods is a book full of Christians and strange mental slides. Its author, Keith Hopkins, is a professor of ancient history at Cambridge. This is his first book written for a general readership and even without its fantastic materials and important subject its authorship would be enough to recommend it; the general readership will be ...”

“... delights to be found in Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse is a squib by Thomas Holcroft, provoked by some disparaging remarks Voltaire made about Shakespeare. In fact, Voltaire was perfectly ready to concede that Shakespeare was possessed of real genius, though of a rough and ready kind, but in denying that he had ‘so much as a ...”

“... after the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame or both, some not: but then, not now, was their moment. Was Connolly himself any good as a writer? The question means little because the point of Connolly turned out to be Connolly not producing the ...”

“... book that contrasting intellectual traditions claim to descend from it. On the one hand, there is Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), which stresses the functionalist element in Evans-Pritchard’s account. Thomas sees the decline of astrology as linked to improved postal services and better ...”

“... two brittle, provisional-feeling general elections are glimpsed on a wall, already disintegrating. Keith Joseph’s notorious speech from that year suggesting that the poor should have fewer children is mentioned in passing. The narrator finds unused candles bought for the three-day week’s power cuts as he gropes around the kitchen of a dead man’s ...”

“... while less visible property could be discovered by asking ‘divers the neighbours of the said Thomas Grene what the said Thomas Grene is worth’. The system of circulating credit generated its own information about property. The witness who said John Tanner couldn’t ‘levye xx s’ claimed to know that because he ...”

“... the interesting opening essay in this book, ‘British Power in the European Balance 1906-1914’, Keith Wilson shows that, however strongly the Foreign Office asserted that it was basing its policies on the maintenance of the Balance of Power as an abstract principle, England’s choice of an association with France and Russia, as against Germany, was the ...”

“... of honours’. Some of it is local yeomen families growing rich: William Ayloffe and Thomas Leggatt, protagonists in the bitterest local feud, both came into this category and both brandished family pews in the face of the parish. Yet, though these families represent economic change within Havering, more represent economic change outside ...”

“... It was written sometime between 1939 and 1941 – Capote was born in 1924 – to his schoolmate Thomas Flanagan. Flanagan kept it all his life. It read: ‘I do hereby solemnly affirm that any statements I may have made about Thomas Flanagan, or said that he had made, were calumnies and lies on my part. Truman ...”