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“... by the second in his vague initial conception of the Holy Alliance as a fraternal union of Christian sovereigns and their subjects without denominational distinction, a notion promptly neutered by Metternich. But the outcome differed radically. The system installed by Vienna was a directorate of the Great Powers (lesser powers were associated only for ...”

“... must be crude and the design profoundly simplified for the maximum emblematic effect. Write John Vinnicum Morse out of the script. One old man and three of his women sleep in the house on Second Street. The City Hall clock whirrs and sputters the prolegomena to the first stroke of six and Bridget’s alarm clock gives a sympathetic skip and click as the ...”

“... Messiah to return – or, in the Jewish version, to come for the first time. In both Jewish and Christian traditions, the motif of waiting for the Messiah sets the moral stage for a range of possibilities: everything from withdrawing from the world to making the world a better place for the Messiah to inhabit, as in Social Gospel Protestantism and Reform ...”

“... was the setting two years later for the Cliff Richard musical Take Me High, in which the Christian rocker traverses Spaghetti Junction and the Bull Ring.Vinen makes some effort to extend his history of Birmingham back to the Middle Ages; the truth is that bar the founding in 1552 of King Edward’s School, which would become an influential elite ...”

“... answer is no. The president should face some hard facts: his 3 per cent margin of victory over John Kerry doesn’t remotely resemble Reagan’s 18 point knock-out over Walter Mondale. Although 1984 marked a decisive victory over liberalism, last year’s election revealed that the most liberal candidate since Mondale was able to run neck-and-neck with an ...”

“... courage in the world wars; the official handbook declared categorically that ‘Britain is a Christian Community’; brightly coloured pavilions on the South Bank paid tribute to picturesque countryside, seaside holidays and an unparalleled tradition of Parliamentary government. To entice foreign visitors, four London buses made a promotional tour of the ...”

“... a visionary monologue notionally addressed to a love-object, though her reality is pretty foggy. John Stuart Mill read the poem attentively in preparation for a review which never appeared, although Browning did later get to see his notes and was understandably struck by one of Mill’s sharper comments: ‘The writer seems to me possessed with a more ...”

“... who died in 2017, was one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past century, perhaps even since John Stuart Mill. Edmonds rightly believes that if Parfit’s ideas about personal identity, rationality and equality were absorbed into our moral and political thinking, they would radically alter our beliefs about punishment, the distribution of social ...”

“... The actual book he is using is also identified: the edition from the Paris printing house of Christian Wechel. And Pound might have added, as he tells us elsewhere, that he acquired the volume in a bookstall in Paris in the early years of the century, probably in 1908. In fact, Pound’s ‘gloss’ cannot act as a gloss unless it is itself glossed in ...”

“... the freethinking implication in recommending ‘the beautiful mythology of Greece’ in lieu of Christian doctrine. It is also right to insist on the meretricious political and social motivations that lay behind the merciless Tory attacks on Keats. Motion summarises these well, and asserts convincingly that Keats expected to be attacked (as a known ...”

“... The yoking of supposedly high and low aspects of life isn’t new, it’s there in Lawrence, and John Cowper Powys finds in it a sort of transgressive holiness, but here it represents no more than a reflex of disgust.Before the ceremony a grieving relative had insisted on the coffin being opened, motivated supposedly by ‘a Huisgenoot article she read last ...”

“... the contrary, it is his religious vocation that is pulling him away from her. What could be more Christian than a large family, she asks? Wouldn’t it be sinful and even criminal to abandon one’s nearest and dearest? Unsurprisingly, she feels vulnerable, nags, becomes hysterical, speaks of suicide. As a result, he is all the more eager to leave. Sonya’s ...”

“... wrote her a naughty poem, ‘Christ is Risen’, in which he promised, today, to kiss her like a Christian, but tomorrow, if requested, to convert to Judaism just for another kiss, and even to put into her hand ‘That by which one can distinguish/A genuine Hebrew from the Orthodox’. Some of Pushkin’s light verse, especially the poems ...”

“... of Mann’s writing, and even of the recent versions of Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain by John Woods. The failings are apparently mostly lexical and syntactical: ‘Knopf have once again employed a translator whose knowledge of German appears inadequate to the task, and who is capable of careless errors.’ Of course it’s good to get things ...”

“... who look at life through the telescopic lens of a rifle, and that was the model for him, much as John Wayne was once a model for boys who thought cowboys put decency back into the world. On 20 July 2012, James Holmes, after dyeing his hair a kind of purple, went to a midnight screening of the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises at the Century movie theatre in ...”