“... Christian faith were constantly before his eyes: he refers to them time and again in his letters. Christopher Sykes teased Waugh once by suggesting that Hell must be his favourite dogma. ‘If,’ he replied, ‘we were allowed “favourite dogmas” it might be. If you mean I see nothing to doubt in it and no cause for “modernist” squeamish ...”

“... one so far – well over two million words, and much more to come. Counsel assisting the Inquiry, Christopher Clarke QC, acting as a kind of master of ceremonies, opened the proceedings by saying that everyone present had read my various witness statements (and, later, Derek Humphry’s) and that he and other counsel representing interested parties had some ...”

“... of this occasion, the nervous fascination of the audience laughing at a renegade Spanish priest reciting unfamiliar Latin words, the canny showmanship, the plastic buckets brimming with money. Paisley’s particular kind of Puritan egotism is voracious in its subjectivity, and for all its insistence on sincerity, is in practice highly theatrical. He ...”

“... of the day. I claim I’m an Indian brave. I claim I’m Sir Launcelot. I claim I’m the parish priest and she doesn’t quibble. I give her a blessing; she says: ‘Thank you, Father.’I sit on the stairs, which are steep, box-like, dark. I think I am going to die. I have breathed in a house-fly, I think I have. The fly was in the room and my mouth open ...”

“... of ‘nature’: if God created the anus so that it was capable of giving pleasure, a Venetian priest observed in 1628, it couldn’t possibly be a sin to use it for that purpose. The Dutch preacher Andreas Klink excused his groping on the grounds that it was an inherited inclination: his mother had yearned too intensely for his absent father during her ...”

“... shaking hands with greyhound owners in nearby bars, and Dilworth itemises his acquaintances: ‘a priest named Murray; the Misses Jervois; retired Colonel L.H. Hastings; a teacher named Deanesley; a woman named Spunday; his doctor, E.E. Lightwood, with whom he walked the shore and dined at the Fort; and a homosexual couple who had a good library’. His ...”

“... and division exactly where, in the case of the Middle East, there is none of either. Senator Christopher Dodd and Representative Steven Solarz, to mention two Contra opponents, are supporters of everything Israel does, and when the connection between the Contras and the Israelis was made public there was a noticeable avoidance of blame for Israel. The ...”

“... in 1904. Tolkien and Hilary, his younger brother, were placed in the guardianship of Mabel’s priest and spent their teenage years lodging with aunts and landladies. ‘My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself ...”

“... of the human mind summoned up the necessity of freedom. ‘The method of free association,’ Christopher Bollas writes, ‘subverts the psychoanalyst’s natural authoritarian tendencies.’ It is a new method of thinking, he continues, which unleashes the ‘disseminating possibilities that open to infinity’. Infinity as infinity (the universe with no ...”

“... in him he’d hidden for too long, and he sobered up (though he continued to smoke like a troubled priest in a 1940s noir film). By swapping some of his alien ‘otherness’ for ordinary sociable life he found ordinary-folks happiness, ease in his skin, an end to constant ambient anxiety. Time calmed down, away from the on-off loop of addiction, which was ...”

“... began pouring down his walls from a flooded flat above him. At 6.20, he got a call from his son, Christopher, who was outside, saying that a fire chief wanted to speak to him.‘Mate,’ the firefighter said. ‘Get ready. Someone is coming to get you.’ He heard a knock at the door and it was them. Two firemen.‘How many are in here?’ one of them ...”