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“... well used by every biographer, but a proper English version has not appeared before, and Professor Christian has done an excellent job on this selection of them, as he did a few years ago on Tolstoy’s letters. The second volume, from 1895 to 1910, when the man has become an adjunct of the legend, is mostly rather boring except to Tolstoy addicts. The most ...”

“... at the outset that they were Ashkenazim speaking Yiddish, a factor which set them aside from the Christian Polish population in the towns. The anti-semitism which has been an unpleasant aspect of Polish history first appeared in the 15th century. This problem was made more acute in the 19th century with the influx of szlachta into the towns to swell the ...”

“... different anthropological vision of the modernists. Frazer’s Golden Bough had linked fundamental Christian doctrines such as the scapegoat killing of Christ with the murderous fertility cults of Adonis and Attis, an idea Eliot prominently remarked in the notes to The Waste Land. But of all the brands of Christianity on offer, it was Catholicism with its ...”

“... was their nature? Most important, could they be fitted into the universalist, no-rivals-allowed, Christian worldview? It was no good saying, ‘There’s no such thing as fairies.’ People knew different, clerics and lay alike. Theories about them proliferated, and their variety only demonstrates the intractability of the problem. The Beowulf poet claimed ...”

“... in the manner of the covering of Victorian table legs. Christmas was ‘a noted event in the Christian calendar’; accents ‘bespoke an Ulster origin’; Synge’s brothers ‘embark on life’s highway’ and – ludicrously, if you think about it – ‘the Abbey Theatre lay hidden in the future.’ McCormack’s delight in the spun sugar of his ...”

“... Patrick Pearse could be anti-clerical, in the days before he came to identify himself with the Christian concept of transcendent blood-sacrifice and cast himself as the chief sacrificial victim. However, all signs of even the most tentative apostasy were swept away by the wind of war. As the 1916 fighting began, Foster writes, the atmosphere of ...”