“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... style’, and whole new lines of children’s toys appeared glor-ifying the Boers and ridiculing John Bull. Even the pacifist Tolstoy was caught up in the wild enthusiasm for the war: ‘You know what point I’ve reached? Opening a paper every morning I passionately wish to read that the Boers have beaten the British.’ He knew that he ‘should not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... He parcelled out his Beagle specimens to white-collar naturalists: to zoological craftsmen like John Gould (who reciprocated by christening a new rhea darwinii after him). Darwin modelled his Zoology on Humboldt’s Zoologie, acting as taskmaster and paymaster chivvying a Gradgrind work-force. Not that he was incapable of such work himself. Although in ...”

“... English versions of the books of secrets could be picked up from dealers like the pharmacist John Hester, whose shop acted as an important centre of recipes and useful lore, while on stage Marlowe had Faustus, an avid reader of these books, abandon law and divinity for the science which gave him the secret of universal mastery. Works on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Hertz and other physicists of the radio epoch. Maxwell worried about his public. He combined a Christian Socialist commitment to teaching science to workers with the gentlemanly administration of Cambridge’s first experimental physics laboratory and the production of major textbooks in electromagnetism, mechanics and heat theory. The insightful Austrian ...”

“... describes William Barrett, a doctor active in the Society for Psychical Research, assisting John Tyndall, a leading scientific naturalist, when Tyndall was demonstrating the effects of sound on light at the Royal Institution in the 1860s. Shaking a bunch of keys, or chirruping, or clapping loudly from a distance, Tyndall showed that he could quell the ...”

“... even foreword mail. An introduction presupposes ignorance. When Albert J. Guerard introduced John Hawkes’s novel The Cannibal in 1948, he could properly feel both Hawkes and his novel were unknown to most readers. But this is what Guerard begins by saying: ‘Many introductions exist to persuade the reluctant reader that the classic text under ...”

“... more in the 1980s, and for the last twenty years she has been the darling of early music lovers, Christian feminists, holistic health practitioners and New Age spiritual seekers. During her 900th birthday festivities in 1998, pilgrims flocked by the busload to the Rhineland abbey she founded, the home today of a flourishing Benedictine community. By the time ...”

“... engineers – under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances are compelled to act like heroes. John le Carré once called him ‘the source on which we all draw’. Alan Furst has been drawing on him for nearly twenty years: ‘The first paragraph of Kingdom of Shadows is a direct citation of Eric Ambler,’ he told an interviewer when that novel came out ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... what in the 1930s the American historian Herbert Bolton called ‘the epic of Greater America’. John Elliott’s long awaited book is just that. It not only fills an obvious gap – more like a chasm – but sets the pattern for a whole new historiography of the European colonial empires. As with all Elliott’s books, the architecture and the scope are ...”

“... the Armageddon-loving forces of darkness, some of which have Muslim names. One critic of the Christian fiction on which the game is based, the dean of a seminary, criticised it for representing an awful will to power on the part of man, ‘putting Evangelical Christians in the heroic role of God’s Green Berets’. The puzzle of what these games do to ...”