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“... The Chiltern Hundreds with one of my lines ‘That’s the cross I’ve got to bear.’ A devout Christian at the time I felt I couldn’t say this line, my notion of piety having much more to do with dubious issues of conscience like this than with practical Christian conduct. Anyway I made my protest and the producer ...”

“... wealth and fame, who, in death as in life, remains an example of what it might mean to live as a Christian in an age of celebrity and superabundance: his aims were high and lofty; his life was an absolute mess. In his thorough and entertaining authorised biography of Cash, Steve Turner establishes a suitably saintly tone on the first page. ‘It was ...”

“... he commented. (The matter was all the more delicate since the dummy book affected to be a work of Christian morality and was therefore even more conspicuous. When the book was finally concealed on the shelves Sartre commented: ‘C’est tout de même utile, la littérature.’) There will, obviously, be other books about Sartre’s private life and it seems ...”

“... as I explained to the late Princess Margaret on one of her visits to the Gallery, stands for the Christian soul. ‘How very, very Spanish,’ she pronounced slowly, after a moment or two pursing her lips. The Antiquary was published in 1816, not long after the Allies had insisted that the French return to Spain the paintings they had confiscated for the ...”

“... to foist their belief systems on the Indians. As Porter points out, the East India Company banned Christian missionaries from operating in the subcontinent. All the same, millions of Indians continued to believe that Christianisation and the destruction of their caste were part of the long-term plan. That fatal misunderstanding was among the underlying causes ...”

“... the beautiful youth whom Apollo loved – his death and metamorphosis into a flower became a ‘Christian symbol of rebirth’. Other categories include ‘Weddings’, ‘Dogs and Cats and Mice’ and later, ‘Dogs and Cats and a Trout’ (called Antonella).The tales take the form of ‘Brief Lives’, giving glimpses of heroic suffering and describing ...”

“... Cultural and physical differences became rungs on a moral ladder. Being ‘heathen’ and not Christian kept most strangers near the ladder’s foot. But the English added another rung: mockery. Wearing grass skirts, worshipping monkeys, eating missionaries, chanting woo-woo ‘animal noises’ or merely being Black? Hilarious! The returning traveller ...”

“... sense to speak of salvation or redemption. Surely the idea of personal salvation is specifically Christian, and also in any case childish? No to both questions. Johnston has a particular interest in Christianity, and regularly uses its distinctive idioms, but any religion that offers different final outcomes for the good and the bad operates with a notion of ...”

“... Jake La Motta’s cruel and frightening disfigurement of his young opponent Janiro in the boxing-ring may go over the heads of many spectators, for whom the film may only be a gorier but fussier Rocky. Jake’s wife has mentioned in the most offhand manner, in an innocent context, that Janiro is ‘good-looking’; Jake, like an inarticulate Othello, has ...”

“... Six, seven, eight times it rang. No answer. He shifted the handset to his chest, letting it ring and ring. The blurb on the back of Gerard Woodward’s second collection, After the Deafening, suggests that we see him as a poetic Kurt Vonnegut who is writing ‘the science fiction of everyday life’. This analogy is ...”

“... damsels in the haunted thickets of Burne-Jones and the sinister bestiaries of Wagner’s Ring, deepen the oneiric mood.One of the best accounts we have of the malevolent power of Lang’s volumes is A.S. Byatt’s novel The Children’s Book, in which Olive Wellwood pays her rackety family’s bills by publishing stories whose ever more tangled and ...”

“... ideas of incarnation – often sacrificial – in a strongly flavoured mixture of pagan-Judaeo-Christian-Freudian symbols. By contrast, the Jungian ambience of Meret Oppenheim’s native Zurich provided the impulse for her works expressing her lot as a woman: such marvellous, mischievous pieces as the famous fur cup and saucer (Petit déjeuner en ...”

“... run is louder than bombs, even if, as often happened in my day at the London Review, people would ring up to cancel their subscriptions when they violently disagreed. It was mostly after we’d run a piece by Edward Said. ‘I refuse to read pieces written by murderers,’ one of them said. ‘And we’re happy not to publish them,’ I said. ‘Said is happy ...”

“... When in the peroration to his ‘I have a dream’ address in 1963, King called for freedom to ring out even from Georgia’s Stone Mountain (the founding site of the second Ku Klux Klan – the national Klan of the 1920s), he did not expect that thirty years later the Congressman from Stone Mountain, Newt Gingrich, would promulgate his ‘contract with ...”

“... its unprovocative title, its brass-rubbings and its frequent dippings into the nitty-gritty of Christian rites, Alan Bray’s last book, The Friend, might not seem terribly exciting at first glance. And yet it is written in part as a defence of John Boswell’s Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, which came out a decade ago, and in ...”