“... Their way of life reached its peak between the 10th and 12th centuries, as reckoned by the Christian calendar. From the ruins they left behind, it is clear that they were remarkable architects and engineers. Among their most celebrated achievements are the so-called Great Houses, large edifices erected from blocks of sandstone and sometimes reaching ...”

“... McAllester and Anderson feature in each other’s books and both spend time eating with John Burns, the New York Times correspondent whom they describe frequently as the ‘doyen’ or the ‘veteran’ of the press pack. They describe the same briefings, the same riverside search for a downed American pilot, the same wait for B-52s flying from ...”

“... remotely like that of the man with the tonsure? But brilliant, knowing … And more deeply Christian (if that’s what one wanted, and surely one did) than even dear Bouts. More compassionate and ironic about our exit from original sin. More modern in its picture of sanctity.Bosch​ – speaking now to the heart of his work, to the people in the ...”

“... savage tribes, like those elsewhere in the British Empire, needed the clarifying light of Christian missionaries or exposure to scientific reason.The maps were imaginative artefacts as much as scientific documents. In the new folio they have been ‘re-curated’, as the cover blurb puts it, with just a hint of the coffee-table book. The maps are ...”

“... Jew from Alexandria. He might as well have been. Born in Jerusalem in 1935 to well-off Palestinian Christian parents, he had grown up in the twilight years of multicultural Cairo, where many of his classmates were Egyptian Jews. His piano teacher was Ignace Tiegerman, a Polish Jew who had moved to Cairo in 1931 and founded a French-speaking ...”

“... Arendt are employed to discuss anything from the depiction of autocrats in Cameroonian cartoons to Christian eschatology to posthumanism. We may not be sure where all this leads us, but Mbembe has never been interested in supplying easy answers to difficult questions.In Germany and France, Mbembe has (against his will) become the public face of an ill-defined ...”

“... imagined progress – from an oral original form in pagan times to its modern meaning as a Christian allegory. The three chapters on Keats, Byron and Coleridge are all important, at times brilliant. The first has a polemical quality, for Keats has long been a favourite poet of the formalists, as Helen Vendler’s accomplished but airless study of the ...”

“... heroes outwit von Stumm and Hilda von Einem as they did in Greenmantle. Giles Railton, the hero of John Gardner’s novel, is a scion of the landed gentry and works in the mysterious upper reaches of the Foreign Office. There he recruits his offspring and nephews and nieces into the ranks of the secret service, just in time for the First World War. But all ...”

“... else. Despite the confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague’s plays: we will never know how many nights’ sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won, written before 1598 and printed ...”

“... collection Write on, in which he attends a Shakin’ Stevens teenybop gig ‘struck by the Christian symbolism permeating the whole event’, suggests he was right not to push his luck with Sheldrake’s musings, even for comic purposes. An American art critic featured on a recent TV documentary about Madonna and her eclectic borrowings puts this sort ...”

“... lighter in tonality, distinctly medieval in mood. Wycliffe reading his translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt, Chaucer and Gower present was started in 1847, a year before the foundation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Nevertheless it has the feel of a Pre-Raphaelite picture. Brown was never a member of the Brotherhood. But his steadfast professionalism ...”

“... and faith at the age of 16 – dramatised by his marriage, at 18, to the ideologically radical but Christian Frida, six years his senior – left him outside the one community which had no trouble accepting an intellectual wunderkind who suffered lifelong bad health and held advanced ideas: that of the prosperous Anglo-Jews who combined Orthodox religion and ...”

“... the final rearguard action of the Borussophiles. It was a bitter episode: Fischer was denounced by Christian Democratic politicians and denied permission to lecture in the USA. Why? Because he had drawn parallels between German expansionist aims prior to the First and the Second World War, and re-opened the question of continuity in German history. Ritter and ...”

“... gave ‘Reform’ MPs a defining political cause and a leader under whom they could rally: Lord John Russell, dubbed by Parry ‘the greatest Liberal statesman of his age’. Over the next forty years, the Whig-Liberal Party developed a distinct set of policies and, more importantly, an idiosyncratic approach to public life. As might have been expected from ...”

“... I avoid all worldly fun. Many photographs of the visionary follow, taken by her Polish father. John K. Sagatis, who died, the book alleges, as a result of the wanton neglect of an NHS hospital. These photographs of an aspiring saint are fascinating: reproduced in the degraded colour of multiple xeroxing, they turn Sister Marie into a kind of performance ...”