“... a passage on the way to the bathroom’. This may be a limited interpretation of one of the great Christian virtues but it is pointing in the right direction. Yet the same person, when she hears that her husband murdered his first wife, instead of deploring the crime, rejoices that he hated the woman enough to take such a step. Maxim has no anxieties ...”

“... author of The Mansions of England in the Olden Time was the artist Joseph Nash, not the architect John; the authority on Hadrian’s Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was Thomas Rymer, not Edward; it was in the ruins of the Capitol, not the Colosseum, that Gibbon conceived the idea of the Decline and Fall; and Rothesay is not ...”

“... Martin Luther King.’ Even Alexander Portnoy is a trusted aide to New York City’s liberal mayor John Lindsay, a tribune of the Great Society. In the thick of his erotic adventures, he can’t help remembering how he spent his childhood listening to ‘marching songs by the gallant Red Army Chorus’. Still, I Married a Communist addresses the culture of the ...”

“... too – or at least the motivation behind it and the values attached to it – is a ‘Judeo-Christian creation’. Every man whose mind is grounded in a scientific way of thinking is a ‘potential executioner’. The ‘temptation to apply the laws of evolution to society soon becomes irresistible. All men flow together into a “mass” subordinated ...”

“... police forces; and terrorist groups of Catholic rightists organised by cabals who opposed Pope John XXIII’s proposals to reconcile the liberal leftist Catholic priests seeking to apply – generally with anarchistic zeal – the ideological thesis of rapprochement between the Church and the poor. (These, of course, were only the principal groups of ...”

“... Whig hero of Parliamentary liberty, Sir Edward Coke, ruled out votes for women; and radicals like John Lilburne, whose tiresomeness as a husband is enjoyably recounted by Fraser, did nothing to restore them, even though contested Parliamentary elections had become more frequent, and even though Parliament came in the 1640s to play a much larger part in ...”

“... year is 1462. Constantinople has fallen, and Turkish Muslims are colonising the map. Our hero, a Christian Romanian count, takes up arms against a force which a voice-over describes as insurmountable – meaning tough but not so tough he won’t be back. After a brief and brilliant battle borrowed from Kurosawa, all skewerings and shudderings in dark ...”

“... Stephen Lushington, the dashing cricketer-jurist who represented the black men Louis Lecesne and John Escoffery after their unlawful deportation from Jamaica, was identified as the son of an East India Company chairman. The planters of Mauritius, which Britain had seized from France in 1810, were also damned as agents of subversion.When Macaulay & Babington ...”

“... Meanwhile, plenty of other countries might also have been classed as ‘pandemoniums’, to use John Milton’s newly minted word. France endured regicide and rebellion and the Holy Roman Empire lost perhaps five million lives to the Thirty Years’ War. Nothing in England was comparable to the sack of Magdeburg in 1631. Jackson anticipates and deflects ...”

“... The Ancient Paths was not so revolutionary. It belongs squarely to a tradition dating back to John Toland’s History of the Druids. Toland, who seems to have invented the term ‘pantheism’, believed he had uncovered ‘the philosophy of the Druids concerning the Gods, human souls, Nature in general and in particular the Heavenly Bodies’, but died ...”

“... Salk’s great work developing a polio vaccine is lambasted as a Jewish plot aimed at infecting ‘Christian children’ with monkey-borne diseases.) Nadja Durbach must find little of this surprising, for today’s controversies echo the mass movement against compulsory smallpox vaccination which flourished in Britain in the second half of the 19th century and ...”

“... will themselves have become as extinct as the ones that science fiction once expressed. (John Clute, quoted here, considered the entire genre a ‘set of fairytales about the afterlife’.) To read this book is to become infected with a fascination I hadn’t realised Mars held. By the end I was left feeling a strange, even European twinge of envy. I ...”

“... flock of Japanese schoolgirls ready to be fucked/ In their school uniforms in paradise.’ And, as Christian Lorentzen has rightly noted, no other poet records so frankly the casual air that until recently typified American racism: ‘One of the sovereign experiences of my life was my joy/Hearing my father in a fury call the man Boy.’ But there is much more ...”

“... This revelation played a crucial (if somewhat opaque) role in motivating his vision of a new, post-Christian morality. Nietzsche’s innovation prompted a huge cultural shift towards subversive genealogical thinking – what might be called the ‘Genealogical Turn’ – including Freudian analysis, 20th-century Marxism, Foucault’s historical ...”

“... ability to produce high-class wonders looked like it would never run dry. Both Wootton and John Heilbron bring fresh insights even to the invention of astronomical telescopy, overworked though the field is. The different points from which they start out are revealing: Heilbron imaginatively grounds Galileo’s complex personality and peculiar ...”