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“... of the shortlist for last year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel, Christopher Priest wrote on his blog that part of the award’s purpose is to prove to ‘the larger world’ that science fiction ‘is a progressive, modern literature, with diversity and ambition and ability, and not the pool of generic rehashing that the ...”

“... In Christopher Nolan’s movies men are always losing their minds: to revenge and an old phobia in Batman Begins; to a clinical condition in Insomnia; to the vagaries of a crippled short-term memory in Memento. The hero of this last film can drive a car and kill people, remember how his dead wife looked and what she said; but he doesn’t know where he is at any given moment, or why he is there, or what he said a few minutes before ...”

“... when I lifted it away, was damp. I sniffed it, half afraid of the smell of death. ‘Are you a priest?’ she asked. Her breath smelled like a dog’s. ‘I am. Don’t you recognise me?’ She looked at me as if she did not understand at all. ‘I have known you for some years,’ I said. ‘Am I dying, Father?’ I averted my eyes. ‘I shall sit beside ...”

“... variegated clergy were taking stock. Were they rivals or fellow travellers? A Russian Orthodox priest made cautious small talk with a young man in extravagant blue and red robes who turned out to be a follower of the Western Orthodox rite from a monastery near Dumfries. At 11.40 a.m., the wandsmen ushered the growing crowd into a tiny courtyard outside the ...”

“... cross-dressing serial killer through a tunnel beneath Helsinki, Timo Harjunpää, the hero of The Priest of Evil by Matti-Yrjänä Joensuu, pulls out his gun and then pauses to consider the health and safety implications of what he’s doing. ‘He recalled that this communal tunnel was used for almost everything: water and ...”

“... sepulchral by the attenuated and dancing shadows’? By page 35, a ‘portentous and dignified’ priest has made an appearance, and on page 42 there’s talk of religion’s ‘tendentious but unchanging certainties’. But it’s hard to relax until page 44, where, in the space of three paragraphs, someone’s ‘intrinsic and extraordinary ...”

“... stage-sets include Italy and Spain, Germany and the Americas; its characters a Croatian Catholic priest called Draganovic and Major Robert d’Aubuisson of Salvador. If British involvement and documentation seem minimal, this may simply be because that famous repository of guilty secrets, the Foreign Office, ‘deliberated for six months, then announced that ...”

“... the reflection? In a new study of English popular religion based on ecclesiastical court records, Christopher Haigh finds that Dent’s four characters represent widely held attitudes. While Dent invented them as useful stereotypes, his book succeeded because people recognised them and the things he had them say. Court records and books like Dent’s can be ...”

“... Cressy’s book). The compulsory recording of baptisms, marriages and burials made the officiating priest a bureaucratic executive, carrying out his instructions and doing the paperwork afterwards. Ritual acts became formal outlines, with registers to prove they took place as they should and the priest had done his job. From ...”

“... In his book about religion, Peter Hitchens has a lot more to say about his brother Christopher than Christopher has to say about Peter in his book about himself.* ‘Some brothers get on,’ Peter writes mournfully, ‘some do not. We were the sort that just didn’t.’ He continues: At one stage – I was about nine, he nearly 12 – my poor gentle father actually persuaded us to sign a peace treaty in the hope of halting our feud ...”

“... for Christopher Penfold The Queen and the Philosopher Sun on the sea running white, sun on white walls, yes, on the thick shoulders of the fishermen as they fanned their nets, sun as an engine, a trapdoor, a compass, Democritus in his cell the window framing sea and sky, blue climbing on blue, a glaze shaken by the heat, as she drifted in and held heavy in the thickening air ...”

“... that they are too many. Of the 40, Catholics get ten and a bit, and Williams has followed Christopher Haigh in downsizing the Elizabethan Catholic mission into a bomb that failed to go off. This leaves an awful hole in the story: it was a real bomb, and blew up a lot of things, including the planter. I don’t think it is grinding an axe to claim that ...”

“... at the end of the three-day Irish Episcopal Conference last March, by the bishop of Elphin, Christopher Jones, a member of the Bishops’ Liaison Committee for Child Protection, who accused the media of being ‘unfair and unjust’: ‘Could I just say with all this emphasis on cover-up, the cover-up has gone on for centuries, not just in the Church ...”

“... red velvet papal cap and dressed himself in the black cassock and broad-brimmed hat of a country priest. Half an hour later, in a state of great agitation, he left the papal audience chamber in the Quirinale Palace by an internal stairway and tiptoed down to the courtyard, where a carriage was waiting for him. The French ambassador to the Holy See, the duc ...”

“... an illiterate Cardiff fisherman. William Hunter was 19 years old, a silk-weaver’s apprentice; a priest sneered at him: ‘It is a merye worlde when such as thou arte shall teache us what is the truth.’ Thomas Tomkins, a weaver, was burned after Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, had forcibly shaved off his long evangelist’s beard ‘so he wold loke like a ...”