“... enjoying his well-told story as an adventure yarn, a mystery. His narrator, John Baltasar, is an American journalist of Dutch descent. Travelling in Spain, during Franco’s regime, he got involved with terrorists, the Basque nationalist movement, and he feels guilty that he was too frightened to help them. Spain preys on his mind in ...”

“... to the Arabs because such a compromise would lead to Israel’s death; the second attacked John le Carré for suggesting that Israel might have over-reacted (‘It is as if we British had lost our temper with the IRA,’ le Carré had written in the previous week’s Observer, ‘and decided to punish the entire Irish people once and for all’); and ...”

“... as Downes proposes, following a learned article by Svetlana Alpers, possess a ‘philosophical and Christian significance’? Are we to suppose that he was devising a highly sophisticated test for the pious, akin to decorating a prayer-book with erotica? Both Downes and Alpers try to reconcile the ‘surface’ meaning of the painting with other, higher ...”

“... downwards.’ The profound patriotism of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what he considered an ‘English’ manner. It really seems, then, not quite proper that distinguished experts ...”

“... progress. His style with the press was flattering to young reporters. He would single us out by Christian name at press conferences, and refer to articles we had written in order to show that he had read them. He seemed to have read everything. He would seldom, on those long railway journeys or over a nightcap in his hotel room, ask for our opinions, but he ...”

“... grasped at the last when his power of speech was gone to indicate the confirmation of his assured Christian belief. Legend has it that Cranmer grew the beard as a sign of mourning for the man who had given him power and authority, but, as MacCulloch shrewdly notes, there is another way of looking at the beard: ‘It was a break with the past for a clergyman ...”

“... small number of professional families. Most people would be more likely to go to a traditional or Christian priest or a Muslim malaam and seek solutions from the other world. There is, in short, plenty of psychiatric work going a-begging; and, what with all the other things we have to worry about, as the Ghanaian economy struggles along and life gets more ...”

“... grandson Matthew Yorke, and rounded off with a touching if too brief memoir by Sebastian Yorke. John Updike contributes a gracefully enthusiastic introduction. For Green, writing fiction was so demanding – partly because he could only work at it in the evenings and at weekends, and partly because he rewrote so much – that it’s not surprising that he ...”

“... the Lunars aren’t that unlike humans: they’re tall but anthropomorphoid, and even claim to be Christian. More recent sci-fi – such as Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’, the inspiration for the film Arrival, in which humans try to communicate with heptapods who perceive all time simultaneously – features aliens that are much more alien. The more ...”

“... is ‘perhaps allied with religion, perhaps a mystic practice and possibly just another form of Christian Science or plain Hubbardian nonsense’. The following year, embracing what he called the ‘religious angle’, he opened the first church of Scientology in Los Angeles. The electro-psychometer was no longer used as a diagnostic tool but became instead ...”

“... name after it was taken up by a group of poet-critics led by Graves and Riding’s one-time allies John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate to fight a turf war within the American academy. Ransom and Tate were convinced that the sociological or philological approaches of their colleagues couldn’t cope with poetry as poetry. The use of external, comparative ...”

“... Orthodox Russia supports the Muslim Ajars inside Eastern Orthodox Georgia; relations between Christian Armenia and Georgia are tense (over irredentism), and relations between Muslim Azerbaijan and Georgia are warm. Not ‘civilisations’ but politics – local and international – is the key, which is why Cornell’s survey includes separate chapters ...”

“... robs another of his country, his wealth and his liberty; and then says he is a brute, and not a Christian.’ He gives a sympathetic account of Islamic worship in Indonesia, and says that China has ‘one of the best regulated governments in the world’. Amid much sermonising, the book has moments of disorienting candour. Delano recounts falling overboard ...”

“... is the only British prime minister ever to have been assassinated? But both he and his nemesis, John Bellingham, are more interesting than this implies, and the fatal act that brought them together, Andro Linklater thinks, is more significant and also more mysterious. They have been the subject of two previous books, by Mollie Gillen (1972) and David ...”

“... person as well as in print. ‘To be taught by Richard Cobb, often in a class as small as an early Christian cenacle, was to be taught life,’ Philip Mansel recalled. ‘He did not simply describe, he transformed himself into a farmer overeating merely for the pleasure of depriving Parisians of their food; a revolutionary who had marinated in envy all his ...”