“... merely how the game sometimes has to be played.The means they ultimately chose was to rally around John Major as the person best placed to stop Heseltine. Thatcher reluctantly came to accept this and therefore to accept the ostensible reasons they gave for her stepping aside. Very soon she would regret having fallen for it. Yet it had been clear for some time ...”

“... is another matter. We leave him poised for a charmed flight as improbable as anything Hans Christian Andersen might have fancied. Fairy stories make hazardous models for those who take them seriously. But we can’t quite do without them. The deliberative prose of Lewis Percy’s story holds the claims of the fantastic and the prosaic in balance. Only ...”

“... from contingency through technical perfection was tentatively figured through the metaphor of Christian atonement, and the constraining force of language was equated with original sin. Such metaphors have been all but abandoned in The Enemy’s country. In the earlier essay Hill writes: ‘Karl Barth remarked that Sin is the “specific gravity of human ...”

“... Sidon, they are being made the test case for the restoration of authority on the part of the new, Christian, Syrian-backed government. Their forces are being disarmed, and their camps put under curfew. It is suggested to them, sometimes none too gently, that they might be happier in Jordan. I had a very jolly Beirut lunch with Hani Hindi, one of the founders ...”

“... at the edge of Europe and of Ireland, because the traces of Neolithic tombbuilders, Celts, early Christian monks and many others since are so visible, and because the islands are one of the last outposts of the Irish language, they have in cultural terms a quality of the ultimate which matches the naked extremism of their geology. There are other ...”

“... nine her little sister died and Olive, who had slept with the body until it was buried, lost her Christian faith. At 16 she was possibly engaged to, possibly seduced by, an insurance salesman who let her down: ‘the waking in the morning is hell,’ she wrote in her diary. At about the same time she was lent a copy of First Principles by Herbert ...”

“... time. At one point he gently shows himself as a callow, would-be writer merely by referring to ‘John Keats and Alfred Tennyson’ – two real writers sporting their Christian names like new ties. The landlady in ‘Fate, Art, Love, and George’ is named from Oscar Wilde. She is Miss Bunbury and keeps old personal ...”

“... the end of the 15th century a new spirit of intransigence had set in. Spain was now a militantly Christian country, and Moors and Jews had been forced to flee or to convert. The consequences of this were enormous. Not only are some of the greatest figures of the 16th century (most probably including Cervantes himself) conversos, but the atmosphere of ...”

“... marriage, a share in family property, and the right to engage in business deals, less through Christian principle than from the fact that their menfolk were often away. Perhaps, also, the existence of the body of Saga literature, in which there are some very outspoken women, influenced views of what was acceptable behaviour. A Woman’s Claim of Right in ...”

“... will bring us to Sunt lacrimae rerum may be ‘In this fallen world we weep’, and in adducing Christian theology that greatly falsifies Virgil. Next, ‘A verb taking one object is monotransitive, a verb taking two objects is ditransitive.’ ‘Monotransitive’, ‘ditransitive’: consider yourself present at the birth; neither of those words is to be ...”

“... coincided with what critics have identified as the ‘epistemological break’ in his work. John Lahr, in his 1984 essay on Allen, wasn’t the first to take the view that the comic’s early films, thin narrative skeletons on to which Allen could graft his anarchic one-liners, were somehow more honest. After the break, according to Lahr and many ...”

“... the dark gentleman ever to speak of it, but it bears a resemblance to that of Queen Victoria and John Brown, her favourite ghillie. Barbara Cartland, of course, could have made something of it. She was very pre-Oprah, and pre-Diana (her step-granddaughter), in believing it quite jolly for gels to be independent and bolters and all that, so long as they ...”

“... call from a former student of mine. He wants to go to Lebanon. He reported from Sarajevo for the Christian Science Monitor but then thought better of all that, found a piece of land and a wife in Helena, Montana, sells hot dogs out of one of those corrugated steam wagons during the warm months, and writes during the winter. He’s half Lebanese and speaks ...”

“... For example, in a metrical, thematically organised poem perhaps designed to mimic earlier English Christian poetry and song (George Herbert, say), the poet composes a prayer spoken by seabirds which, while still dropping the odd Joycean pun, seems sombrely portentous for no immediate reason: Pray for us when we fight the wind one to one; let not that ...”

“... scepticism, exemplified by David Hume, which they saw as corroding the foundations of Christian faith. Reid, in An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense of 1764, argued in response that ‘there are certain principles … which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe.’ Reid and Beattie denied that philosophers ...”