“... 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 ...”

“... Museum of Modern Art in New York has had a string of such figures, from William Rubin to John Elderfield to Leah Dickerman). Today the more telling split is between modern and contemporary fields (the latter has no exact birthdate – 1970, 1980, 1989), but this is a schism less between the university and the museum than between scholarly curators ...”

“... The history of England,’ Sir John Seeley declared in The Expansion of England (1883), ‘is not in England but in America and Asia.’ Like many aphorisms, this was at once consciously perverse and entirely apt. Seeley wrote as a fervid supporter of imperial federation, ‘Greater Britain’, but he was also taking issue, as in a preceding series of lectures delivered at Cambridge, with the introspection that characterised so much contemporary English historical writing ...”

“... ought probably to be signed and punctuated so that visitors don’t saunter away from a Christian Ethiopian mural (out of Africa) to find themselves in front of a Brazilian fish mask (into the Americas) used for warding off sickness during the dry season. The objects on show might then begin to look as good as the displays in the Pavillon des ...”

“... ethnic conflict. American reviewers have been unable to resist comparing Shteyngart’s book with John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, though the two novels share very little beyond an omnivorous, obese hero who falls for a girl from the Bronx. Temperamentally, Misha Vainberg is Ignatius Reilly’s opposite. Reilly railed against the lack of ...”