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“... and my poverty, and uncertain, most probably very scanty income; and consent in the spirit of Christian meekness to make me her guardian and director, and be a second wife to her daughter’s husband! If she can, then I say, she is a noble woman; and in the name of Truth and Affection, let us all lie together, and be one household and one heart till ...”

“... the ostentatious solemnity one finds in the liturgical minimalism of composers like Arvo Pärt and John Tavener. The Messiaen ‘cathedral’, if not exactly ecumenical, is vast, with plenty of room in the nave – as Edward Said noted – for ‘staunch secularists like myself’. The sixth movement of Vingt Regards, a turbulent fugue, is called ‘Par Lui ...”

“... he and Hill had made their own. Witness to the Beast finds the filiation in the sect founded by John Reeve and Ludowick Muggleton in 1652. Blake’s mother, Thompson suggests, may have been a Muggletonian, and many of his notions must have been derived from their brand of antinomianism. The respect and affection he shows for this mild, diminutive band is ...”

“... wilderness renamed is still a wilderness,’ writes Lawson-Peebles in apparent agreement with John Quincy Adams and Joseph Hall, both of whom had scorned the ‘edenic’ fables told about the West. But is it? Yes, in the sense that you can still starve or freeze or get eaten in it. But we’re talking about writing and reading here. To an audience ...”

“... teaching, and which might therefore be approved without apparent inconsistency. Second, Pope John XXIII, elected in 1958 as a ‘caretaker’ pontiff, had surprised everyone by encouraging Catholics to re-examine many aspects of their faith previously regarded as sacrosanct. In 1962 he called for a second Vatican Council to reinterpret the Catholic faith ...”

“... prepared to subscribe, such as the Kantian idea of treating people as ends in themselves or the Christian idea of the equal worth of all human beings before God – even if these contradict many more concrete beliefs. On the basis of the latter, for example, he claims that it was simply a mistake, resting on poor inference or distortion of the ...”

“... to construct in his writing an ideal, clear and simplified world of traditional morality, Christian belief, family hierarchy, and slow and patient work.’ It is not quite wrong, but it is not quite right. ‘Simplified’ sounds as if it should be correct, but as one ponders the word, it begins to look odd. Crusoe’s life on the island is, after ...”

“... Powell’s account of why he favoured that one – that it combined a characteristic English Christian name and an English river – seems reasonable. It sounded like the name of the sort of man he would be in his writing, the name, you might say, of his imagination; but it was not a new self, Eric Blair remained alive and well. But Stansky and Abrahams ...”

“... the fray, claiming their country to be the perfect model of how to modernise a nomadic, non-Christian, cattle-based society. Similar bizarre competitions flowered in other parts of the Third World. Those were, in their way, golden days: who cares for Conakry’s favour now? A less obvious intellectual casualty – apparent in many of the contributions ...”

“... it exists, the way in which it exists is evil, being full of unfreedom and disorder.’ Even the Christian God is in trouble, because he has created ‘a world which he continues to love although it refuses to love him in return’. But then precisely because the world is like this, realism in art must always be subordinate to other projects of the kind we ...”

“... is very good at describing what we all see, but that his way of looking is suffused with a long Christian tradition of holy paradox. His love of the ambiguous and multivalent word (‘And glowery is a mighty word with two meanings/if you crave ambiguity in plain speaking/as I do’) has as its tonal correlative an attraction towards rhetorical tropes and ...”

“... feeling that there must be more to political life than perpetual defeat. Neil Kinnock and John Smith felt this as strongly as their successors, but their successors went a lot further. In a famous essay published nearly ninety years ago, Max Weber suggested that politics was becoming the territory of the professional: politics was the politician’s ...”

“... less as an NRI than an ABCD (American-Born Confused Deshi), an Indian-American who is also a Christian. Balram lusts after Pinky, her fancy perfumes, skirts and low-cut tops, through the rear-view mirror. Pinky, for her part, sneers at Balram and his crude English and his habit of scratching his crotch while working in the kitchen. In an improbable ...”

“... but accepted its economic model.That doesn’t mean there aren’t villains, however. Ghosh quotes Christian Parenti’s description, in Tropic of Chaos (2012), of the ‘politics of the armed lifeboat’: ‘open-ended counterinsurgency’, ‘militarised borders’ and ‘aggressive anti-immigrant policing’. The Pentagon ‘devotes more resources to the ...”

“... respect from the prominent British child analysts Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby. Questions were asked about the significance of the father in child development, and family therapy opened up the family as a system rather than a cult of personality. At the same time we were encouraged to believe that everything depended on what the ...”