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“... to want, by the powers that be (the society, the body). ‘In over one and a half millennia,’ Peter Constantine writes in the introduction to his compelling new translation, ‘Confessions has maintained a persistent and intense relevance for readers throughout the world.’ And part of this relevance is that it is as much a book for unbelievers as ...”

“... only the West that goes Wah! – than from the helpful introduction to Fresco by the panglossian Peter Constantine, who supplies some historical and cultural background. Lleshanaku’s poems have a flavour and a feeling and a world, but they’re not such that you would back yourself to make her life story out of them. So it is from ...”

“... Few rulers​ have set in motion developments of such momentous consequence as the emperor Constantine, with his conversion to Christianity in 312 and subsequent halting of the persecution of Christians, ratified a year later in the Edict of Milan. Over the 17 centuries since then, theologians, historians and even novelists, including Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, have claimed that a change for the worse in the quality of Christianity (the kind of change an earlier age would have ascribed to supra-natural agents like the Devil or the Antichrist) can be personified in this rather flashy Roman emperor ...”

“... holy place where St Eustachius was converted to Christianity.’ It also identified the Emperor Constantine as the builder of the church, which Pope Sylvester had consecrated early in the fourth century. Local priests confirmed that the church had been dedicated to St Eustachius, originally a Roman general called Placidus, who while hunting saw a stag with ...”

“... for example, the celebrated demonstration by Lorenzo Valla, who died in 1457, that the Donation of Constantine was spurious. The Donation was an eighth or ninth-century fabrication that purported to be the instrument by which the Emperor Constantine had in the fourth century ceded to Pope Sylvester I dominion over Rome, all ...”

“... The victor’s crown in every various art.We are in the fourth century ad. Far away, the Emperor Constantine cosies up to a new saviour, but in the schoolroom the old patrons, Muses and Graces and Hermes son of Maia, still rule the benches, where another generation will learn the grammatical Greek and sophisticated style that admit it to the Hellenised ...”

“... as the guardian of religious orthodoxy, and even (through forgeries such as the Donation of Constantine) as the true inheritor of Roman authority. To understand ‘the formation of Christendom’, then, we must learn to see Carolingian Europe as it saw itself, with all the shortened perspective, the historical falsifications and illusions of ...”

“... account of ‘Russians in 18th-century Britain’. Their profile was modest. Cross started with Peter I’s celebrated visit of 1698. Of around four hundred compatriots who followed in his footsteps, most enrolled as students, although there were also naval recruits, apprentices to shipbuilders and instrument-makers, and others (like British businessmen in ...”

“... from the martyr stories, and the presence of three bishops from Britannia’s cities at one of Constantine I’s empire-wide councils in 314, all the evidence we have is from the era after Constantine’s successors began to favour the Church rather than traditional religion, and thrust the older cults aside. The ...”

“... add: ‘Why did gold become money in the first place?’ Or: ‘Will gold ever be money again?’ Peter Bernstein’s history of gold as money is very much better at answering the first question than the other two. Pecuniary anthropology is very, very perilous. In the absence of evidence, both Aristotle and Adam Smith made implausible conjectures about the ...”

“... the worst possible choice), whose report was published in March. Separately, a panel headed by Sir Peter Gross, a former commercial lawyer and appeal judge, is reporting on the future of the Human Rights Act, despite the fact that the sustained political assaults on the act and the convention, which were designed to get the UK excluded from the EU, became an ...”

“... in his family, the many places they had lived and how strange their lives had turned out to be. Constantine Cavafy was born on 29 April 1863 in Alexandria, the last of the nine children of Petros Cavafy and Charikleia Photiades, both of whom came from well-to-do families in Constantinople. Petros had travelled to England in 1836 to join his older ...”

“... Tory MPs like Julian Amery (originally seen helping Zog in Albania), Winston Churchill and Peter Temple-Morris deliver themselves of staggeringly banal pronouncements. In spite of some of them going on ‘fact-finding’ missions to the Middle East, they are as ill-informed and full of poor advice on their return as they were before. Even worse, when ...”

“... centuries. The working out of these various, often divergent points of view is the concern of Peter Brown’s Through the Eye of a Needle. One of the great strengths of this humane and thoughtful discussion is Brown’s refusal to rush to its conclusion: the nexus of wealth, charitable giving and salvation that marks a faultline between the ancient and ...”

“... have had a lurid hold on the popular imagination for at least two millennia. The idea that St Peter was crucified upside down was no sooner taken as a sign of his self-proclaimed unworthiness to share the fate of Jesus, than it was reinterpreted as a mark of his common sense. Even a poor fisherman knew that hanging head down brought the oblivion of ...”