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“... Whatever may be the judgment of time on the intrinsic value of Renan’s contribution to the sum of knowledge, he can never lose his place among the few great names in the history of letters.’ This assessment from the 1901 edition of Chambers’s Encyclopedia, equally striking today for its confidence and its remoteness, summarises the conventional wisdom at the beginning of the 20th century ...”

“... Christ tells Mary Magdalene to spread the news to the other disciples. On this scriptural basis, Ernest Renan asked in La Vie de Jésus (1863), an account that caused outrage in its day: ‘Did enthusiasm, always credulous, create afterwards the group of narratives by which it was sought to establish faith in the resurrection? … Let us ...”

“... a detailed narrative of the life of the Prophet Muhammed, prefaced this with a quotation from Ernest Renan on the origins of Islam: ‘Its roots are at surface level, the life of its founder is as well known to us as those of the Reformers of the 16th century.’ But in recent decades various scholars, working mostly out of Britain, Germany and ...”

“... infinitely appreciated them’. The dialogue ends with the appearance of the historian Ernest Renan, who seems to believe homosexuality is some sort of affectation, to be denied because it deprives men of the experience of heterosexual love as poetry or madness or both. ‘The pleasure of your senses,’ ...”

“... etc, with various stereotyped literary conventions (Matthew Arnold and his unacknowledged mentor Ernest Renan were the chief culprits), and even with certain biological characteristics – ‘Celtic’ genes for phenylketonuria, cystic fibrosis and HLAA1, the B8 tissue antigen being the current fashion. Lhuyd cannot be held responsible for these ...”

“... on medieval Islam’s contributions to science, philosophy and art. In combating the theories of Ernest Renan and other Europeans who held that Islam was fundamentally fanatical and opposed to rational thought, 19th-century Muslim thinkers ‘essentialised Islam and Muslim identity on their own terms’ by conjuring an image of a glorious civilisation ...”

“... across my mind. Among these there suddenly appeared a phrase used by the French historian, Ernest Renan, in speaking about the history of the Jews during the early years of the Roman Empire. Somewhere I had once read an observation by him to the effect that those years had presented Judaism, then in one of its rare proselytising phases, with its ...”

“... at any given time preferred their subjects to forget. Selective amnesia is not unique to Russia: Ernest Renan pointed out long ago that national memories are constituted as much by forgetting as by remembering. What is unusual is the sheer quantity and variety of dramatic and often bloody events in Russia’s past that historians, in accordance with the ...”

“... exile’. Two interesting essays at the end on the Orientalist writings of Raymond Schwab, Ernest Renan and Louis Massignon contain fascinating material, but Said’s French needs a lot of pardoning and I don’t know the subject enough to know whether this radically affects his discussion. Among the more strictly theoretical pieces the best is a ...”

“... with raging fanaticism in their hearts’, eventually ‘deadly to the human race’? Or Ernest Renan on Islam and ‘the intellectual nullity of the races that hold, from that religion alone, their culture and their education’? Perhaps it’s wiser, with Algeria and Vichy lurking in the not-so-distant past, for ethnic conservatism not to ...”

“... expressed with Powell’s intensity tends to repel historians, or at any rate to unnerve them. Ernest Gellner, for example, says he is ‘allergic to the history of ideas approach, because nationalism as an elaborated intellectual theory is neither widely endorsed, not of high quality, nor of any historic importance’. He argues in Nations and Nationalism ...”

“... the Cross!’; or that the photographer Nadar was shortsighted to the point of blindness; or that Ernest Renan recoiled from the English word ‘comfort’ in 1859 with ‘I am forced to use this barbarous word to express an idea quite un-French’; or that after Thermidor, busts of Marat and Le Peletier were transferred, presumably from the high altar ...”