“... rights. For many, the coronation oath was the guarantee of this mutually beneficial relationship. John Rastell, a legal publisher, wrote in 1527 that the monarch ‘shall grant to hold the laws and customs of the realm and to his power keep them and affirm them, which the folk and people have made and chosen’.As a result of this constitutional ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... When​ T.S. Eliot asked John Hayward in February 1938 to act as his literary executor (‘in case some unexpected calamity cuts me down like a flower’), he told him to prevent publication of his literary remains – including ‘any letters at all of any intimacy to anybody’. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I have a mania for posthumous privacy ...”

“... to perishing.’Soon after the founding of the Eglise Métropolitaine, Satie and Latour wrote a ‘Christian ballet’ about the conversion of the pagan Uspud, an extraordinarily odd piece of theatre. A Mammal’s Notebook reprints the stage directions. It opens with Uspud playing knuckle-bones in the desert beside a semi-circle of statues. There are skeletons ...”

“... principles’. The illustrative quotations reinforced this emphasis: ‘The term Whig,’ Lord John Russell said in the 1850s, ‘has the convenience of expressing in one syllable what Conservative Liberal expresses in seven.’ The entry ranged widely over the (mainly pejorative) extensions of the core use, including such delights, now lost, as ...”

“... During the Middle Ages both she and her work were largely forgotten. (According to one legend, the Christian patriarch Gregory of Nazianzos, offended by the licentiousness of her subject-matter, put her books to the torch in 380 AD.) Neither Dante nor Chaucer refers to her. Only with the recovery and translation of certain ancient texts in the Renaissance ...”

“... and acknowledged it as a profound inspiration: Islam seemed to him a liberating alternative to the Christian morality of Germany. ‘The poet considers himself a traveller,’ he wrote of himself in the ‘announcement’ for these poems. ‘He has already reached the Orient. He enjoys its ways, its customs, objects, religious beliefs and views.’ Though he ...”

“... Book will have such an impact. Many will regard it simply as a tribal occasion for a particular Christian denomination, and so will choose, like the priest and the Levite in the gospel for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity, to pass by on the other side. That would be a mistake. The modern Church of England might look like and often behave like a ...”

“... Front, piggybacking the jihadist agenda on the age-old grievance of Muslim lowlanders against the Christian highland domination of the country. There are as many Muslims in Ethiopia and Eritrea as there are Christians, and they have been there since the beginnings of Islam. One of Islam’s holiest cities, Harar, lies on the eastern slopes of the Ethiopian ...”

“... He continues: ‘The same idea of putting oneself in the position of another is involved in the Christian commandment that we love our neighbour as ourself.’ That, however, is a Christian commandment that really is a direct quotation from the Pentateuch (Leviticus XIX, 18). His brief, bumpy ride through the history of ...”

“... di People’s Election Special rolling off a thirty-year-old Heidelberg printing machine at the John Love Press, a small works where the centre-spread of an eight-page edition was already flouncing onto the delivery table. (This little engine-room of populist exasperation was another non-Kaplan place.) Paul Kamara, one of the paper’s editors, drove down a ...”

“... But as Julius shows, the rejection of the Blackshirts’ prejudices is a rejection of anti-Christian paganism. The play is not a plea for modern Jewry – it is an endorsement of Christianity in ‘both its historical and supernatural forms’. The Rock is not Eliot’s Our Mutual Friend. By detailing the scope of Eliot’s anti-semitic remarks and ...”

“... herd.’ If you cite this sort of passage from Nietzsche (or similar ones in William James or John Dewey) in order to argue that what we call ‘the search for objective truth’ is not a matter of getting your beliefs to correspond better and better to the way things really are, but of attaining intersubjective agreement, or of attempting to cope better ...”

“... material of the book could just as well have formed the basis of a very different sort of work. John Betjeman picked up on this odd and wholly characteristic ambivalence when he wrote to congratulate him: ‘When I read the book it seemed to me so rockingly funny that nothing else would seem funny again.’Decline and Fall is one of a number of Waugh’s ...”

“... He affects​ the Metaphysics,’ Dryden wrote of John Donne, ‘not only in his satires, but in his Amorous Verses, where Nature alone should reign; and perplexes the Minds of the Fair Sex with nice Speculations of Philosophy, when he shou’d ingage their Hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of Love ...”