“... 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 ...”

“... lurked the recognition that Popery would never be eradicated, and therefore that schism in the Christian Church was there for ever. Some understanding of this would have enriched Dr Aston’s understanding of the increasing desperation behind Protestant iconoclasm. Instead, we have an equally valuable analysis of the chopping and changing of the Henrician ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a long way – he published an article on the subject in 1942. His well-known studies of Early Christian and Byzantine architecture and his book on Medieval Rome impinge on politics at a number of points. However, his concern with the ‘political aims’ of building programmes and even with ‘art as a tool of politics’ is particularly clear in his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... champion athlete, a talented theatrical performer and singer, even a ‘new Apollo’. Jewish and Christian tradition chimes reassuringly with this, painting Nero as a demon or the Antichrist. It is surely no coincidence that, as many have calculated, the numerical equivalent of the Hebrew letters which spell ‘Neron Caesar’ adds up to 666. Yet – and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... today is obvious. There are other similarities: suspected economic motives; an assertive Islam; Christian religiosity on the Western side; international difficulties (especially with France). Only time will tell whether one further aspect of this earlier imperial history repeats itself in our new protectorates: the way Britain was sucked into Egypt, so that ...”

“... a forced marriage, but teachers ignored her. When her parents discovered her relationship with a Christian Lebanese boy, she ran away from home – her teachers, concerned that he was having an adverse effect on her schoolwork, had told her family about him. Taken to Kurdistan to marry her cousin (one account says Pakistan), and forced to undergo a virginity ...”