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“... granite wall. The happy ending is secured when the peasantry joins with the nobility to invoke the Christian decencies. Jones published this at 21 and it was well received. He became a close friend of Bulwer-Lytton, and introduced the spirit and style of German Romantic poetry to a London audience in his own verse. He also engaged in the favourite Victorian ...”

“... Elsie, Strong recalls without irony, was ‘a better class of person’, the same evocative phrase John Osborne used, with heavy irony, as the title of his autobiography. Osborne was six years older than Strong and from a strikingly similar background about which he was equally unforgiving, as was another close contemporary, Joe Orton. The three make a ...”

“... with library-loads of poetry and fiction in several languages, with the liturgies of all the main Christian faiths and with theories of ethnic character and origin, archaeology and sociology, on which his grip was rather uncertain. But in spite of all this knowledge, gathered not only from books but from countless conversations with Balkan people and their ...”

“... dazzlingly witty drawings. They recall the great 19th-century champion of the true principles of Christian architecture, Augustus Welby Pugin, though they are rendered with the calligraphic style of Barbar the Elephant and in a format that owes quite a bit to Le Corbusier’s polemical tract Vers une architecture. Things that Krier and Le Corbusier ...”

“... are usually given as George and Lady Mary Hamilton. The daughter appears to have been Sophia St John Hamilton. Just then Foscolo was brushing up his English by reading Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, which he later translated into Italian. The Hamiltons’ dashing and accommodating captor, according to one account published under the pseudonym Captain ...”

“... the village, police were stopping trucks and cars. A few miles further on, at a fort in a Chaldean Christian village called Bartilla, we exchanged the pick-ups for military vehicles, fitted with armour-plating and bullet-proof windows like spyholes. In Nineveh province the curfew was being taken seriously. There are gypsum-processing kilns along the road that ...”

“... home movies. The release of Kinsey has reignited an old controversy in the US. Conservative Christian groups are denouncing the film as a Hollywood whitewash which elevates a man they consider responsible for everything from Aids to child abuse into a hero. Following a carefully orchestrated campaign of complaints, some TV stations have refused to show ...”

“... with rather juvenile insults to religion – the Virgin was a whore, Christ was a bastard and St John was his bedfellow, and so on. It seems that one somehow needed to publicise the outrageousness of one’s heretical opinions by talking in this manner. And indeed the most curious aspect of blasphemy and profanity in general is this apparent need. What use ...”

“... the Andy Warhol Museum on Sandusky Street, where Andrew Warhola was born in 1928. As the director John Waters has said, every kid needs someone really bad to look up to, and the Warhol legacy carries on that counter-cultural role for a new generation. The museum recently organised an exhibition of the prison photographs from Abu Ghraib. In rural West ...”

“... was ascribed to Satan. In the first systematic treatise devoted to the topic, published in 1637, John Sym, a Puritan, was still able to attribute suicide to ‘the strong impulse, powerfull motions, and command of the Devill’. But natural causes were increasingly being blamed: melancholy, a dysfunction of the hypochondriac organs, folly, a foul ...”

“... states remained Catholic: to their rulers, notably Philip II of Spain, the English were anti-Christian and their queen a heretic. She spent the last 18 years of her reign fighting the Spanish, emptying the royal war chest and becoming increasingly dependent on the rich merchants who topped it up again. Driven by a sense of social utility as well as ...”

“... effects of different rates than on the exegesis of ancient texts. In a pamphlet from 1691, John Locke made an early, influential argument against efforts to hold down interest rates, claiming that this incentivised speculation, hurt prudent savers, and benefited only ‘bankers and scriveners’ who were ‘skilled in the arts of putting out ...”

“... Virgin and Child, and an object resembling a hairy man – ‘some say a hermit, others think John the Baptist.’Kircher’s contemporaries puzzled over fossilised animals and their distribution. The Walloon mathematician René-François de Sluse wrote to the Royal Society in London enclosing a sketch of stones resembling shellfish: ‘It is strange that ...”

“... makes a very pretty girl, and when the sultana who has slipped him into the harem asks, ‘Christian, canst thou love?’ he bursts into tears – overwhelmed by thoughts of his last mistress. He is only able to regain his manhood and take advantage of his erotic opportunities later on. The poem is original, both in its manipulation of stereotypes and ...”

“... among the wretched.One way to survive was through internal exile. Thirty years after the war, Christian Schad, so forgotten that he had no reputation to blemish, would exhume himself to become a sucker for Oriental religions and an octogenarian flower child. Schad’s minutely rendered subjects were ...”