“... intellectual and social credentials. In the 18th century, the foundations of received Christian faith, undermined by deism, had been shored up for some time by the physico-theology of Bishop Joseph Butler, later assisted by the Rev. William Paley’s Natural Theology: or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. According to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Johnston, William McGrath, Carl Schorske, Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin, Andrew Whiteside and John Boyer testify.* There are a number of plausible reasons for this. The first and most obvious is the great diaspora of Central European scholars brought about by the rise of Nazism in the 1930s – though some intellectuals, like Wittgenstein and ...”

“... to ‘a monkey house at feeding time’. It was in the same year, 1951, Deane tells us, that John Montague, also writing in The Bell, called for an end to the apathy which seemed the predominant feeling about cultural matters, and at the same time ‘demanded of his generation that it reflect Catholicism as a living force in Irish life’. His ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... death. He knew exactly what he was looking for. He wanted repentings, deathbed returns to the Christian fold, eyes glowing with assurance of hope even on the scaffold. What he most dreaded was what he got from David Hume: placid, apparently good-humoured acceptance that identity – physical and spiritual – ended with death. In his book The Needs of ...”

“... feel, imagine or remember which, in their judgment, requires to be curtailed or cancelled.’ John Wing is taken to task for remarking that a young woman’s grief-stricken response to the death of her husband is a ‘typical depressive reaction’: ‘Her grief and mourning are looked upon as a pathological syndrome. The basic decisions are of a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... relativised them – was the knowledge Macaulay gained of parts of the world outside Christian Europe, vicariously through his father, and then directly from his own stay in India between 1834 and 1838. The early Victorians were great travellers, but tended to glean very different lessons from the experience. One group, satirised by Thackeray as ...”

“... while Washington could retreat to Mount Vernon. Alcide de Gasperi, leader of the Christian Democrats in Italy, was like Mandela in having defied a repressive regime; de Klerk was like General Jaruzelski. And so on. Or perhaps it’s an analytic framework that binds Ackerman’s examples together. We are told that revolutionary ...”

“... hell itself, filled with writhing beasts that rend at one another as fires destroy the earth. In John Martin’s The Country of The Iguanodon (1837), a group of dragon-like reptiles slither and bite; in A. Demarly’s apocalyptic Eruptions of Poisonous Hot Springs in the Triassic Period (1883) a geyser of toxic gas spurts from a volcanic vent, while dead ...”