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“... higher rhetorical style than is favoured by either. At its best, as in the essays on John Stow and William Camden, the method can produce work that is very vivid. Occasionally, the reader may be left wondering whether the vividness of the writing takes it a little bit further than the words of its source, or, as in the interesting essay on the Paracelsian ...”

“... in New York and teaches law at Fordham University.) Wallace’s depression was recognised by William Kennick, the philosophy professor who had been his father’s mentor, and he returned home to recover in the spring of his sophomore year. He was for the first time suicidal. As he came out of it, he sent Costello the short stories he’d started ...”

“... on the border with Ukraine, possibly in preparation for an invasion. The director of the CIA, William Burns, was dispatched to Moscow to talk Putin down. He ended up speaking to him on a secure phone. Burns told him that the US would respond with harsh sanctions in the event of an invasion. Putin responded tauntingly that the time had never been so ripe ...”

“... specifically, St Pancras Old Church, must be fitted to accept the apocalyptic destiny proposed by William Blake.     The fields from Islington to Marybone, To Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood,     Were builded over with pillars of gold, And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood. Dun’s argument, like the one Charles Williams sketches in the ...”

“... in his preface to Orthodoxy, that he is seeking to offer ‘an explanation, not of whether the Christian faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it’. If he has come to believe it, it can be believed – what further demonstration could we want? The question is whether it should be believed. Chesterton thinks it should, but is ...”

“... be taught’. I wonder, disingenuously perhaps, if one of those ‘key personalities’ will be William Hone. He certainly should be. Hone is one of the ‘national heroes of our past’ who struggled to secure our freedoms and to widen the franchise. He fought hard to resist the encroachment of the executive on the province of the judiciary, and now that ...”

“... was an early version of Hamlet, possibly by Kyd; a prototype Henry V, starring Dick Tarlton and William Knell. And, a little later, there were the first ventures of Ben Jonson – Hot Anger Soon Cooled, written with Thomas Dekker and Henry Porter, and Robert II, with Henry Chettle – now just bodiless titles in an old theatrical ledger. The case of Marlowe ...”

“... it was a mere village, situated a mile north-east of the city on the old Roman road. This is where William Pynchon, a key figure in Malcolm Gaskill’s new book, went to live in 1610. Born in 1590 in Writtle, another Essex village, he grew up to be a convinced Puritan, profoundly unsympathetic to the church of Charles I and ...”

“... and hence of the need to transcend it – was made possible by Christianity itself. For the Christian conception of a divine Reality lying behind the realm of appearances, and more specifically its practices of confession and self-examination, created and fed an ascetic drive to uncover the truth of things at all costs. So, when Nietzsche argues that ...”

“... the fruit to the British West Indies resulted in a celebrated disaster. Two years earlier, William Bligh had been given command of the small armed vessel Bounty and ordered to cram it with as many Tahitian breadfruit saplings as it could carry before sailing to the Caribbean, where they were to be grown to feed slaves. En route to Tahiti, Bligh gave ...”

“... many decades earlier by a British missionary, A.T. Bryant (1865-1953), and the story this ‘Christian with a classical education’ created ‘from external schemas of how a people’s history ought to read’. It would be hard to imagine a more powerful demonstration of the way early medieval historical narratives worked on European imaginations. My ...”

“... nervous illnesses which Richard Greaves unhelpfully approaches by means of psychiatric theory and William Styron’s compelling account of his own severe depression. In 1650 Bunyan had heard three or four women discussing religion: they were, he said, ‘far above out of my reach’, and he began seeking out the company of these people, who were members of a ...”

“... In 1779, a Scottish doctor called William Alexander published a two-volume History of Women. Alexander was a man of the Enlightenment who regarded politeness to women as a mark of civilisation. Savages and ‘musselmen’ might treat their women as sexual helots, but a gentleman was solicitous of his womenfolk. Whether women deserved such treatment was another matter ...”

“... Tinling); a third, who rose from private in the Honourable Artillery Company, was a devout Christian who launched the Hammer House of Horror (Sir James Carreras). All demonstrated that a spell in uniform, as the sovereign’s trusty and well-beloved, never cramped a creative talent, and perhaps that a creative talent never cramped a military one. The ...”

“... on such matters), is one of the Parsifal problems; the issue of whether or not the work is ‘Christian’ is another. Nietzsche isolated these two problems together with a third, which is more peculiarly German: like Hanslick, Nietzsche detected and detested a conjoining of ‘religious’ and ‘nationalist-patriotic’ feeling, which he saw as a ...”