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“... 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 ...”

“... more than those who had formally embraced the dominant religion, had an affinity with the ‘Christian outlook’ that saw Protestantism as more a commitment to good order than to God. Both Stern’s parents were baptised, and although he seems never to have had much interest in religion, his sister did. She insisted on going to confirmation classes in ...”

“... now rarely viewed as anything but positive. In the era of rock and roll and of Philip Glass and John Adams, it seems normal and desirable for music to aspire to be a narcotic. We live in the time of the triumph of the ‘theatrocracy’ that Nietzsche deplored, in which we can find many descendants of Wagner’s favourite dramatic form, the pseudo-spiritual ...”

“... for the Balkans: Turkey-in-Europe and Ottoman Europe. Its inhabitants were in the main white and Christian, but in important contrast to the Middle East, the region was never colonised by Western powers, which allowed it to become the repository of any manner of fantastic imaginings. Goldsworthy explores this history of Western perceptions and prejudices by ...”

“... an instance of ‘Neo-Christianity’, meaning that it was an attempt to show you could still be a Christian without believing anything in the old way. Clearly Positivism was superior to this ignominy. The review attracted much attention, as did Harrison’s forthright views on other matters. Like Mill, he wanted to bring Governor Eyre to trial for murdering ...”

“... but even here his illuminating suggestions must be weighed against the distinguished essay by John Creaser in the Lindley volume which points, heretically and convincingly, to the ‘royalism’ of Comus, or at least of the occasion for which it was written. The radicals were apparently against ‘authoritarianism’ – but who was more authoritarian ...”

“... of family continuity. It may, more crudely, reflect the fact that the range of generally accepted Christian names was remarkably small. It is much too early for judgments on this topic, or many others, to be made with any hope that they will stand. These areas of human experience demand from the historian, not only laborious study, but also a sensitivity to ...”

“... often convincingly, to Shaw’s need to wish away the intrusion into Shaw’s infancy of George John Vandaleur Lee – or, rather, the intrusion of the suspicion that Lee had been the lover of Shaw’s mother and was, perhaps, Shaw’s real father. In the teacher-pupil (or sculptor-statue) relation of Higgins to Eliza Doolittle, Mr Silver persuasively sees ...”