“... nervous illnesses which Richard Greaves unhelpfully approaches by means of psychiatric theory and William Styron’s compelling account of his own severe depression. In 1650 Bunyan had heard three or four women discussing religion: they were, he said, ‘far above out of my reach’, and he began seeking out the company of these people, who were members of a ...”

“... Tinling); a third, who rose from private in the Honourable Artillery Company, was a devout Christian who launched the Hammer House of Horror (Sir James Carreras). All demonstrated that a spell in uniform, as the sovereign’s trusty and well-beloved, never cramped a creative talent, and perhaps that a creative talent never cramped a military one. The ...”

“... district’ ceased to function towards the end of 1975, when it became the front line. Christian snipers took up positions on the upper floors of the hideous new Holiday Inn to sight and murder my neighbours. Palestinian commandos, the backbone of what was then an alliance of Sunni Muslim and leftist factions calling itself the Lebanese National ...”

“... on such matters), is one of the Parsifal problems; the issue of whether or not the work is ‘Christian’ is another. Nietzsche isolated these two problems together with a third, which is more peculiarly German: like Hanslick, Nietzsche detected and detested a conjoining of ‘religious’ and ‘nationalist-patriotic’ feeling, which he saw as a ...”

“... was the primary reason King James II was forced out and replaced by reliably Protestant co-rulers, William and Mary. This Revolution brought in its train several other constitutional changes. Within two decades the succession had been diverted through the Act of Settlement (1701) to the Protestant Hanoverian line whose direct descendants have reigned since the ...”

“... or Soviet-style Marxism. Some of the most prominent social planners of those years, such as William Beveridge and Barbara Wootton in Britain, Pierre Laroque and Francis Netter in France, together with many campaigners for a united or federal postwar Europe, were heirs and exemplars of the positivist tradition of social, political and legal thought. Two ...”

“... as ‘a poet, first and foremost’, and this view was confirmed by no less person than William Heinemann himself, who assured him, as he took the MS of Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (1919): ‘Of course, Mr Lewis, we never accept poetry unless it is good.’ Lewis had the delicacy to publish the poems under a pseudonym. Before he returned ...”

“... of politics. The now semi-legendary Thompson announced in 1955 that Carpenter (unlike, of course, William Morris) represented the cosy intellectualism of those ‘whose aspirations are satisfied today by comfortably converted old cottages on the rural fringes of great towns, a goat in the paddock, and an occasional bout of classless bonhomie and darts in the ...”

“... Liberty in 1971 as a private religious college and it played an important role in nurturing Christian causes, from the pro-life movement to Bible prophecy. It was the more embarrassing, then, that a Liberty student was arrested at Falwell’s funeral with homemade bombs in his car. He told police he’d brought them just in case liberal protesters ...”

“... bêtise, niaiserie, démence’. Two important Enlightenment systematists, R.A. Vogel and William Cullen, made a different decision: in their systems paranoia was enlarged by making it part of the vesaniae, which included mania and melancholia; in Cullen’s system, a disorder of the class vesaniae would involve a lesion of the faculty of ...”

“... precise nature of their bodies, their means of reproduction, their life spans, their relation to Christian dogma, and their possible interest in ordinary mortals. That interest, Empson suggests, is frankly sexual and is satisfied by a means closely akin to demonic possession. Oberon and Titania have chosen to attend the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta ...”

“... His discussion of it, in the chapter on ‘Justice’, is the centrepiece of his book. ‘William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll,’ the song begins, ‘with a cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger.’ ‘William Zanzinger had 24 years/Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres’; Hattie Carroll ...”

“... pop up, in a frivolous or portentous spirit, and they are often relevant to the concerns of William Gaddis’s later novels, JR and Carpenter’s Gothic. One of the slighter-seeming themes is the learned American’s scorn for those of his compatriots who know no language but English. If you have ever been in Athens or Rome with an American ...”

“... right’ and associated ideas – advanced during the Enlightenment by the abbé de St Pierre, Christian Wolff, Jeremy Bentham and others – about how a global society, a civitas maxima, might be established and maintained. The construction of a perpetual peace on this scale would not be possible without treating the coarse timber of an all too tribal ...”

“... Lothian, judged by another member to be ‘airy and viewy’, a Roman Catholic who converted to Christian Science, became private secretary to Lloyd George in the First World War, and the British Ambassador in Washington in the Second; Robert Brand, thought by Jan Smuts to be ‘the most outstanding member of a very able team’ in South Africa, who became ...”