“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in His Study. Here, a Sicilian artist working in Venice in the mid-1470s represents the early Christian saint in the nonpareil of home offices. St Jerome sits reading at his desk on an elevated podium; other books and artefacts line the shelves around him. The architecture is lofty, gothic and fantastical. Framing the scene is a stone archway with a ...”

“... Riders, the first book he appears in. His fiancée, Helen, spends all her savings on an Augustus John drawing of a horse for his wedding present. She gives him it, goes to answer the doorbell, and when she comes back fifteen minutes later finds him looking at the drawing with satisfaction. ‘That’s better.’ ‘What?’ said Helen. Then, noticing a ...”

“... the aftermath of Castle Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb that was exploded over Bikini in 1954, John Anjain, a magistrate from nearby Rongelap, reported that ‘women gave birth to creatures that did not resemble human beings: some of the creatures looked like monkeys, some like octopi, some like bunches of grapes.’A little north of the equator, and just ...”

“... met regularly to discuss his progress. A ‘pastor’ from SPAC Nation, an evangelical Christian church that runs programmes to draw adolescents away from crime and violence, gave him a place in a house the church owns in the suburbs of south-east London. Thapar has misgivings about SPAC Nation – it has been accused of financially exploiting its ...”

“... vessel held by a robed acolyte. Beneath is the legend, Voici le calice du salut, with two similar Christian exclamations in English and German. Yourcenar remarks that the engraving is executed ‘in that Sulpician style which in those days still bore faint traces of the grand manner of the 17th century’, and that the acolyte is evidently St ...”

“... Tomlinson would term ‘the merely human’, Staff offers a vision which resembles the suffering Christian humanism in the last three lines of ‘The Windhover’. Like Hopkins, he rejects the vicious sprezzatura of military heroism and in doing so comments on his society. During the last decade, many Irish poets have been translated into Polish and this is ...”

“... strange forms which 20th-century Irish novels display from Joyce to Beckett to Flann O’Brien and John Banville. When the lack of freedom is viewed, on the other hand, as a structural defect, based on economic forces, then the novel tends to be much more dependent for its appeal upon the verisimilitude with which the social formation is registered. Even if ...”

“... Mark has chosen an appropriate patron saint, it would seem, since the original St Basil, an early Christian father, was a famous preacher, a believer in a community life of shared work, an advocate of taking religion into the city rather than privately out into desert places. So the original function of the Church as an institution is cunningly brought into ...”

“... vary.’ Consider my own country. The main proof that this lethal practice flourished here in pre-Christian times derives from the ancient Irish Laws which recognised and strove to regulate the rite of ‘fasting against a person of exalted state in order to enforce a claim against him’. This elegantly succinct definition I take from the long essay entitled ...”

“... old days. Erasmus was a keen observer who dispels illusions. This humanist dawn was no period of Christian love, of sweetly singing choirs (Erasmus loathed English Church music, anyway), or of healthy green lands in an ecologist’s dream. In his efforts to spread a scholarly Gospel, Erasmus met hostility and underwent much suffering. The Latin ...”