“... on committees; it could hardly be mistaken for a creature of the same name defended long ago by William Blake. Dame Helen herself seems often to speak on behalf of some public body. And sure enough she speaks up for Lord Robbins and her other colleagues, for the most part robustly impenitent though prepared to concede ‘a disturbing development, which we ...”

“... Intelligence Agency, Bill Casey, devised a plan for revenge. One of the CIA’s top agents, William Buckley, was posted to Beirut to implement it. In March 1984, Buckley was taken prisoner and tortured. Casey’s brilliant plan ended in the deaths or hasty flights of several of the CIA’s agents in the area. Casey ordered that a photograph of the ...”

“... coincidence of surname – the Dawkins in question was the geologist and palaeontologist Sir William Boyd Dawkins, not a direct ancestor, if ancestor at all, of the present carrier of the Darwin meme – before Johnson has recovered from his spiritual despond. In a twinkling he has reconciled God and Darwin. Thereafter his magnificent self-confidence ...”

“... would continue to get worse: that is a major reason for wanting to know what happened next. A Christian interpretation would be less bleak, but the Ellmann biography made that much less probable, as was widely recognised. However, such attempts are still being made. Robert Boyle SJ, in the Quiry, points out the liturgical grandeur of the language at the ...”

“... as animals or angels, up or down the scale: so for a pagan there was no problem about it. For a Christian trying to be ‘syncretist’ about pagan belief, this might make it slightly easier, though still a problem, to think that Middle Spirits, like animals, did not have to attend the Last Judgment. The rigid distinction between angels and Middle ...”

“... belonged to his parents too. In the absence of any other aristocracy in residence in Dublin, Sir William and Lady Wilde represented a type of grandeur that they had built with their books and their brains, their independence of mind and their high-toned eccentricity. When Wilde describes himself in De Profundis as ‘a lord of language’, he is suggesting ...”

“... suffering has any special purpose in the divine scheme, thereby seemingly reducing the crux of Christian theology to vacousness. Pain appears to have become an embarrassment. Yet even if we don’t philosophise about it these days and have outgrown decadent Fin de Siècle glamorisation, in our daily dealings it remains as important as ever. It’s pain ...”

“... None of this affected Rodinson’s attitude to Islam and its history. His breach with the dominant Christian narrative was permanent. He died in 2004. Three years earlier, in an interview with Le Figaro published as an appendix to this new edition of Muhammad, he argued that violence wasn’t any more intrinsic to Islam than it was to other ...”

“... role, she carried everything to extremes, her egotism above all. When she was 15, she decided that William Lamb was the man for her, and she duly got him; but not until 1805, when his prospects were changed by his becoming the Melbourne heir on the death of his elder brother, did he feel able to propose to her, a development which pleased the families of ...”

“... of Elizabeths, Sarahs, Janes and variform Anns (Nancys, Nans and Hannahs), you would have the Christian names of something close to 80 per cent of the female population. There was a similar pattern with Johns. About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the ...”

“... Around​ 1800 William Macpherson, the 16-year-old son and heir to the chief of Clan Macpherson, decided to try his hand at planting in the West Indies. The family had been Jacobites and urgently needed to repair their finances. His father, Allan, had failed to make a fortune in the East Indies and William knew he had to make good ...”

“... to one item, it will be gratified by the next. Thus, in the Sinclair-Stevenson list, the admirable William Scammell (Five Easy Pieces) has to rub shoulders with poets whose every move shrieks its discordance with his. The Carcanet list that houses Patricia Beer is a good deal more harmonious; but it features John Ashbery, of whom one has to say that if he is ...”

“... and, when in a rage, Christina could be a ripper and a smasher. The elder sister, Maria, and loyal William Michael were the ‘calms’. On ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ William’s editorial comment was: ‘I have more than once been asked whether I could account for the outburst of exuberant joy evidenced in this ...”

“... can rub up the Establishment. One such who was to rise higher and stay longer than most was Ernest William Barnes (1874-1953), for nearly thirty years Bishop of Birmingham, an office to which he was nominated by Ramsay MacDonald, who also appointed Hewlett Johnson as ‘red’ Dean of Canterbury. Barnes’s career could scarcely have been more different from ...”

“... thousand. Patrick Sellar, the estate manager before Suther, called them ‘barbarous hordes’. William Young, Sellar’s partner as estate factor, called them ‘a set of savages’. The tenants in the western district of Assynt were described by the Sutherlands’ under-manager, an ex-army man called Gunn, as ‘a useless body’, ‘unprincipled in their ...”