“... 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 ...”

“... had employed slave-hunters to capture Somerset and put him on a boat for Jamaica. A baptised Christian, Somerset was able to appeal for support and a writ of habeas corpus was secured for his release. He went to Granville Sharp, who agreed to take the case. Sharp was concerned with the legality of slavery in England and especially troubled by ...”

“... career as a conservative ultramontane priest, became a liberal journalist, and ultimately embraced Christian socialism. While the high politics of the July Monarchy were often derided as lethargic and boring – ‘a bland … bourgeois stew’ in Tocqueville’s words – public life was otherwise feverish and unpredictable. For Tocqueville, this ...”

“... Epistemologically, the medieval church’s synthesis of ancient philosophical rationalism and Christian mythology had never been entirely stable, but it had supplied a comprehensive account of this world and the next, and the path of the believer from one to the other. Protestantism, in discarding this sophisticated cosmology for the bare letter of the ...”

“... so to speak – began:It is very remarkable … how frequently we find some of the earliest Christian remains in the vicinity of pagan mounds, tumuli and other ancient structures, as if the feeling of veneration remained round the spot; and, though the grove of the Druid was replaced by the cashel of the ...”

“... and refine this recruitment strategy with the devshirme, the ‘harvest’ of young boys from Christian families in the Balkans and southern Russia, who would be taken to Istanbul, converted to Islam and trained for careers in the army (as Janissaries), the palace or the bureaucracy. The key principle was that the army should not be recruited from the ...”

“... with pitchforks’) appealed to the same bloc of voters with a programme that was militantly Christian, white, nativist, provincial, protectionist and anti-Washington. In 2000, Karl Rove cleverly enrolled this quasi-Poujadist faction in his grand alliance of libertarians, born-agains and corporate interests. It’s worth remembering that in 2004 every ...”

“... blow rather than the scrupulous fleck of paint. It’s as if Rodin had apprenticed himself to Gwen John, and that isn’t at all how their story played out. After The Ghost Writer Zuckerman became Roth’s stand-in of choice, in Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson, the three books being republished in 1985 as the trilogy Zuckerman Bound, with The Prague ...”

“... but the strange truth is that they happen all the time. Unfortunately, having finished Christian Wolmar’s book I will never now be able to enjoy a long-distance journey on the Metropolitan, knowing that from 1910 until the start of the Second World War commuters – and returning theatregoers – could for sixpence travel in one of the ...”