“... has chipped away his deity, and who is deep-seatedly obsessed with the monstrous parachronism of Bishop Ussher, too late a date for the very earth. But then Nettleship is himself a touch belated, smouldering away thirty years after the publication of In Memoriam. Wilson, who writes with such easy assurance as must leave him plenty of time to attend to ...”

“... and Geoffrey set out in his car to report the matter to the police in Kitale, taking four-year-old Elizabeth with him. Helen gave him a memorandum for the DC, ‘as he could never remember’. At her trial one throwaway sentence in the memo was to prove damning: ‘I have had them beaten.’ Once in Kitale, Geoffrey, without his wife’s knowledge, withdrew ...”

“... suffered a shortage of torturers when they were needed, men who don’t even have the excuse of Elizabeth I or Calvin that to diminish the horror of the punishment was somehow to condone or even share in the offence. Sometimes ecclesiastical authorities, in milder mood, asked only for public penance, but up to about 1700 there was a preference for judicial ...”

“... Mr Brabazon horses’. No great reader, Jeffreys’s most expensive purchase was the works of the Bishop of Exeter at thirty shillings, but usually she preferred secular books, especially Greek and Roman histories in translation. A biography of Mary, Queen of Scots caught her eye in 1639. She regularly bought almanacs for the farm, and once ‘a litle boke of ...”

“... not record that Johnson made any effort to restrain the limb with which he was about to refute Bishop Berkeley. It is because we cannot help our gestures that so much effort has been put, over the centuries, into classifying and regulating them. Traces of this effort survive: in the manuals compiled for orators, actors, preachers; in legal depositions and ...”

“... Though England still had an heir to the throne in the ten-year-old Prince Henry, the queen, Elizabeth of York, now dangerously old at 36, immediately sought to make assurance doubly sure by conceiving again: the pregnancy was to kill her. Isabel and Ferdinand, however, wanted to maintain the alliance that the marriage of Catherine and Arthur had ...”

“... and history. In the 1870s the subjects might have grown up as a single faculty at Oxford had not Bishop Stubbs, the Regius Professor of History, vetoed the proposal. When Oxford gave social respectability to Eng. Lit. by founding the English School in the 1890s, the syllabus required undergraduates to demonstrate a historical knowledge and to relate ...”

“... By a bizarre twist, G.K. Chesterton may be en route to sanctity: it was reported in August that the Bishop of Northampton has begun a suit for his canonisation. Diarmaid MacCulloch doesn’t invoke Chesterton’s miracle-working powers, but he opens this expanded version of his 2012 Gifford Lectures with a Father Brown story, ‘The Oracle of the Dog’: by howling at a certain time, the animal gives the priestly sleuth the clue to the murder weapon ...”

“... to reflect it – which is why, from the heretical medieval philosopher John Scottus Eriugena to Bishop Berkeley and W.B. Yeats, there is such a robust Irish faith in the imagination’s power to summon new worlds into existence. Philosophically, this suspicion of realism went hand in hand with a rejection of rationalism and materialism. If there is such an ...”

“... a Hero, has not worn well. The parents of George, the ‘hero’, are parodic monsters. The wife, Elizabeth, and the mistress, Fanny, are the sort of predatory women who can and do drive a man to his death. George nourishes ambitions to break into the world of letters, for reasons that are mysterious, since he despises that world: ‘In the course of his ...”

“... the lamentations of churchmen horrified by the amorality of the entertainment. Although the bishop of London briefly succeeded in banning masquerades between 1721 and 1723, helped in part by an outbreak of plague in Marseille that spooked the authorities, religious homilies couldn’t stop the cultural juggernaut, which within a few years had brought in ...”

“... with him...’ Meaningful innuendo can be injected into any sentence if we add ‘as the Bishop said to the Actress’, or vice versa, and Professor Cox is too sensible to indulge in such aberrations. The tone of his book does show, none the less, how it is that so much state-of-the-art literary criticism has come to disregard the enjoyment of a ...”

“... than the British who excel in the invention of traditions. And although the presence of an Irish bishop and a Scottish sceptic in the empiricist trinity made it necessary to think of the tradition under the title of ‘British’ rather than ‘English’ empiricism, it was always as a very specifically English cultural tradition – like cricket, afternoon ...”

“... become orthodox to assert that James I tied the theatre much more closely to the state than had Elizabeth I, increasing its prestige while decreasing its independence. Barroll demolishes this hypothesis, systematically and irresistibly. James’s own attitude to plays remained dismissive; the social status of actors could hardly have been lower; the rise in ...”

“... people thought that they were living in the Last Days, expecting the imminent end of the world. Bishop Hugh Latimer, preaching before Edward VI, told him: ‘We know by scripture and all learned men affirm the same, that the world was made to endure six thousand years,’ of which 5552 had already passed. As our guide, MacCulloch is in the optimum position ...”