“... his subjects were to believe, on the most central and currently contested doctrines making up the Christian religion. So far so good. No one will quarrel with that. But most historians have viewed successive versions of official Henrician doctrine as a mishmash and muddle, committee work, a constantly moving target, from the Ten Articles to the ...”

“... anniversary of a school that one of Luther’s followers wrested away from the monastery of St John in 1529 and renamed the Johanneum. Great figures of the German Enlightenment had taught or studied there; C.P.E. Bach and Telemann had been music masters during the 18th century. All this is to make clear that my image of my father before I knew him is of a ...”

“... Cheyne and his diet. He was favourably quoted in Tom Jones; Samuel Johnson commended his books; John Wesley’s Primitive Physick copied out whole sections of Cheyne’s work; and his patients included Pope, Gay, Beau Nash, Richardson, the Methodist Countess of Huntingdon, Robert Walpole’s adolescent daughter, Catherine (who died under Cheyne’s care of ...”

“... peace was embraced by thinkers who, in the early 16th century, included men like the theologian John Colet, Thomas More and their presiding genius, Erasmus. In England, policymakers bought into the idea of peace for pragmatic reasons as much as out of ideological conviction. As Henry VII’s former minister Edmund Dudley put it in 1509, in a treatise ...”

“... polity which arose from the marriage in 1385 of Jogaila, the pagan Grand Duke of Lithuania, to the Christian princess Jadwiga, heiress to the Kingdom of Poland. Like the convergence of England and Scotland, but more slowly, this union of crowns developed into a royal and parliamentary union in which each partner – kingdom and grand duchy – kept much of its ...”

“... am suspicious of, the possession theory. This story goes that the addict is like any other poor Christian, but he’s been taken by the devil. His addiction is not something he could choose (after all, it certainly isn’t something he would choose), and therefore he can’t be blamed for it. Unsurprisingly, some finessing of the notion of blame often takes ...”

“... could be no doubt about his reverence for the Bible. To anyone wondering about the truest form of Christian worship, his advice was clear: ‘search the scriptures thy self,’ he said, with ‘constant meditation upon what thou readest, & earnest prayer to God to enlighten thine understanding’. He was convinced the Bible was, essentially, a sacred ...”

“... has become everything. This is a man who has written just as convincingly on Don DeLillo as on John Donne, on Kazuo Ishiguro as on Joachim of Flora. But then this is one way of thinking of his special gifts as a critic. Nothing is a ‘field’ for him, there are no fences or trees in the way. The main army can camp anywhere; the avant-garde can camp ...”

“... Spanish archival material, Economic Relations between Nazi Germanyand Franco’s Spain (1996) by Christian Leitz and Franquismo y Tercer Reich (1994) by Rafael García Pérez, though the latter focuses on the period of the Second World War. The topic is also covered in nearly all of the major histories of the Spanish Civil War. It is simply wrong to ...”

“... time: Cyril Radcliffe served on the Boundary Commission for India, while the egregiously indolent John Sparrow would shortly be asked if he would provide a constitution for Pakistan, a request about which he made the characteristic observation, ‘Declined: too busy with my practice at Lincoln’s Inn.’ A fellow of an earlier generation, Viscount ...”

“... terrorism, legitimising more and more suspensions of legal and other rights? The ominous aspect of John Ashcroft’s recent claim that ‘terrorists use America’s freedom as a weapon against us’ carries the obvious implication that we should limit our freedom in order to defend ourselves. Such statements from top American officials, especially Rumsfeld and ...”

“... out of Van but also for ‘rescuing’ the Armenians by transforming their ancient, afflicted Christian kingdom into a modern Soviet Socialist Republic. He told people in America either that he was Russian – sometimes that he was Maxim Gorky’s nephew and Kandinsky’s student – or that he came from the Caucasus. En route to their transatlantic ...”

“... an express elevator. It is a cultivated essence of shop-window shrines and Pentecostal chapels (John Wesley with tambourines, lugubrious and off-pitch). Its own particular harsh pure green is raised and reinforced until it becomes an architecture. It is to green what a snowball is to white, an impactment. Although Brainard was raised a Methodist, these ...”

“... his image as a ‘loveable, fantastical Jewish genius from Vitebsk’ (Clement Greenberg)? Crypto Christian or too Jewish? During the last decades of his life, Chagall was among the most public of public artists. He created murals for New York’s Metropolitan Opera and painted the ceiling for the Paris Opera; his mosaics embellished the First National Bank ...”

“... long life. On the one hand, there was the solid evidence provided by the longevity of the early Christian desert fathers – hunger artists who were supposed to eat only enough to keep life going – while, on the other, the ‘theory’ implied by the image of the candle was that the lower the flame, the longer the candle lasted. And so Caloric Restriction ...”