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“... In 1886 there was an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery of the work of John Everett Millais (Sir John, in fact: he had recently been made a baronet). There were pictures from his Pre-Raphaelite infancy, like Isabella and Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop; anecdotal ones, like My First Sermon (a child portrait in the Bubbles line); landscapes (Chill October); pictures with stories (The Proscribed Royalist) and pictures from stories (Mariana ...”

“... The body as the sum of all nostalgias. Empire of footfalls; Mother as Script and Ideal – and love no chance event, no accidental stir of wings, or blueprint spiked with hospice. What hymn tunes come to mind at Candlemas, the fence wires rimmed with ice, our plum trees medieval in the first blue gloaming? What carol for the kill-site, sodden plumage scattered in the grass, and beautiful? Always, the meadow is now: the chill after dusk, hunter and hunted pausing in the fog to listen, summer barbering the skin ...”

“... Somewhere in the skirts of the fabled land of Prester John, late in the 12th century, Baudolino, the protagonist of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, encounters a pygmy. He discovers that ‘the greeting to exchange with him was Lumus kelmin pesso desmar lon emposo, which means that you pledged not to make war against him and his people ...”

“... of the IWW, the Communist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Louis Tikas (a union leader gunned down in John D. Rockefeller Jr’s ‘Ludlow Massacre’ of striking copper miners and their families), but also recognises the corporate and state industrial violence and denial of labour freedom that was a distinctive feature of the ‘American ...”

“... pay for a suitable room large enough to accommodate her needs,’ or Gabriel adding, ‘Perhaps John and I should talk it over. See if we can come up with a plan that will please you,’ or (about his model Annie Miller): ‘I merely want to state that I have not seen her since you came to Bath and other than inadvertently will not do so in the ...”

“... our ways of thought are many conceptions of heaven that we thought were just like ours. Thus early Christian hopes make sense against an entire system of eschatology which has passed away; the fact that the New Testament can be translated into modern English does not make it a modern book. There is also much good material on Victorian ideas of heaven, and a ...”

“... a political vision centred on challenging racial inequality.’ These aren’t reasons to prefer John Bolton to John Kerry as the next secretary of state, but they aren’t nothing. Unless they pursue the annexation of Canada, the Republicans can no longer win national elections just by being the white ...”

“... of the Christ, the bestselling American novel until Gone with the Wind. Everyone seemed to be very Christian, more than half the books they printed were Bibles, and most of the press operators had served in the army. Liberals in town had started a rifle buy-back programme. I spent the night in the Holiday Inn watching television, which I didn’t have at ...”

“... Cold War fantasised Mutually Assured Destruction, leaving the faint hope of permanent stalemate; Christian fiction prophesies the coming of the ‘end times’. There is no escape. Prepare. The novels will help. The first sign that the Apocalypse was approaching was the foundation of Israel in 1948. The Jewish ‘homecoming’ was both miraculous and ...”

“... one of the most attractive emblems of the formation of Christendom.’ What went to form the Christian culture which Reichenau symbolises? Everyone knows that it took the careful preservation of Early Christian beliefs and practices through the so-called Dark Ages, and the maintenance along with them of the remnants of ...”

“... her representatives casting the queen as ‘the most invincible and most mighty defender of the Christian faith against all kind of idolatries’, and constantly emphasised the iconomania of their Spanish rivals. Not everyone was convinced by these analogies between faiths: one observer of the Moroccan diplomatic delegation that visited London in 1600 wrote ...”

“... The unseen spectator who was most involved in Pope John Paul’s progress through Britain, formerly in partibus infidelium, was the spirit of John Henry Newman, dead these 92 years, who doubtless observed the proceedings with mixed feelings. Surely Newman, a man of retiring temperament, would have been horrified by the crowds and the publicity which for the moment turned the search for a Via Media into a media event ...”

“... of any Democrat partisans to Obama’s left. Hope somehow never dies. In 2008 Krugman supported John Edwards, then Hillary Clinton, and then fell in line behind Obama even though he saw his candidacy as a ‘cult of personality’. ‘There’s a trap I’ve seen some people fall into,’ he said in 2010, ‘you let your vision of what should be get ...”

“... his script sounds like an awkward adaptation of the ‘Two Americas’ routine deployed in 2008 by John Edwards (who showed that a genuine sex scandal comes with a divorce, a love child and a near-miss at a thirty-year jail sentence). Between Quinn and de Blasio is the mild-mannered, African-American Bill Thompson, a former comptroller who tends to split the ...”

“... isn’t convinced by the case for voting for a lesser evil. ‘The suffering’, Noam Chomsky and John Halle wrote in June, that Trump’s ‘extremist policies and attitudes will impose on marginalised and already oppressed populations has a high probability of being significantly greater than that which will result from a Clinton presidency’. My father ...”