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“... There were many St Pauls in Antiquity. Even more are still being invented. About each, there are stories, doubts, ambiguities. One problem is that Paul is an icon of early Christianity, and of Western culture. His central significance for later Christian theology means that any interpretation of his thought is necessarily grounded in personal belief, or prejudice ...”

“... Hell is not just God’s vengeance on humanity, nor is it only, in Sartre’s sardonic phrase, other people. To be sure, it can be the tortured, persecutory visions of a few psychotic madmen. But the most troublesome, pervasive hell is the nightmarish world which each of us constructs, unconsciously, in the sweat of unconfessed, unconfessable fantasies ...”

“... lends some credence to the view that the system produced a meritocracy. But that view is mistaken. Keith Hopkins speaks more than once of the ‘considerable ability’ needed for the ‘top jobs’, but there is a fair amount of evidence that many incompetents or mediocrities held top jobs throughout the Republic. As we can see all around us today, if a ...”

“... Teresa. A World Full of Gods is a book full of Christians and strange mental slides. Its author, Keith Hopkins, is a professor of ancient history at Cambridge. This is his first book written for a general readership and even without its fantastic materials and important subject its authorship would be enough to recommend it; the general readership will ...”

“... to contradict what has always been regarded as an established negative principle of ethnography. Keith Hopkins, in his astonishing study of brother-sister marriage in Roman Egypt, has now effectively laid to rest the dogma about a universal taboo against incest of this kind.† When this onrush of new social knowledge from the past is set alongside the ...”

“... with the number of administrators in 12th-century China duly reappears (it was introduced by Keith Hopkins, himself a great one for calling other historians ‘conventional’). Veyne, for his part, has much to say about the ‘thousands of autonomous cities that formed the fabric of the Empire and were controlled by local notables, the governing ...”

“... American astronauts danced on the Moon, the BBC played ‘Ground control to Major Tom ...’ Jerry Hopkins, an American rock critic, thinks this was an odd song to choose for the occasion. ‘In a way, it didn’t make any sense. “Space Oddity” was about a loser, who drifted off into space, rather than complete his mission. It was as if the BBC hadn’t ...”

“... or more versions have been made by men. The best-known of them are Francis Steegmuller and Gerard Hopkins; and though Steegmuller did write some fiction – including mysteries under the name of David Keith – it’s a fair bet that Davis is the best fiction writer ever to translate the novel. Which suggests a further ...”

“... his only serious rival. The picture that emerges – and has emerged at every turn since Jerry Hopkins published the first, fawning biography – is of an awkward man lacking in direction. Elvis has suffered remorseless gossip, and triumphed over it to such an extent that he now seems more remote than ever. His ex-wife, whose timing is impeccable, has ...”

“... with a vulpine head. In Poet and Critic, an interesting edition of Hughes’s correspondence with Keith Sagar, we have yet another version, from a letter of 1979, which is quite close to the published text but adds an inconsequential dream about a leopard on the following night. Hughes dutifully offers Sagar the probably unnecessary gloss: ‘I connected the ...”

“... Stallworthy from submitting himself further to Kipling, Housman, Dylan Thomas, Sidney Keyes and Keith Douglas. I find it strange that Tosswill sent him to Yeats and, in another letter, to Hopkins and Melville, writers to whom he was likely in any event to become addicted. No talk of much Eliot, much Empson, or much ...”

“... Struggle in the Ancient Greek World or even of the triumphant, subversive and witty index (sic) of Keith Hopkins’s Death and Renewal. The simple fact that none of these (not even Hopkins) passes the clitoris test does not deny them a recognisably ‘personal voice’. ‘Part of the trouble,’ concludes Martindale ...”

“... park, road closed here from monday 2 july, footpath closed, keep clear – I met a man called Keith Foster, one of those centaurs of the marshes: camera-head perched on bicycle. Foster, who described himself as a ‘fieldwork photographer’ for Waltham Forest, had been keeping a meticulous record of the Lower Lea Valley, the shifts in land ...”

“... thoroughly sardonic about it at the same time (‘a poetic gift,’ he once said in an essay about Hopkins, ‘is always inordinate in its demands’). His ‘quasi-telegraphese’ style leaves out words which grammar normally requires, such as pronouns and articles, and omits too the fuller information or explanation that you might expect in a more ...”

“... he got a sound it would take the Rolling Stones until 1972’s Exile on Main Street to secure. And Keith Richards says he still can’t work out some of Moore’s blistering riffs and runs.) Listening to these itchy little songs in your front room, sixty years on, you miss the most vital spark in the detonation: Elvis’s own vivid, mercurial presence. His ...”