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“... of what we would like them to be.’ That, at any rate, is what Douglas Kenrick has to tell us. Sam Harris begins The Moral Landscape in much the same way: ‘The more we understand ourselves at the level of the brain, the more we will see that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human values.’ Kenrick and ...”

“... outcome, sinks back into his black leather regency armchair and turns again to his interlocutors, Sam Harris and Douglas Murray. I’d cheered for the first option, not least because I was interested to know how on earth it was going to work. The O2 was less than a third full, but even so, that’s an audience of six thousand people. This is a venue so ...”

“... stupidity and sometimes dangerousness of religious belief. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens: over the previous few years each had published a bestselling book condemning religion, and they were all rather pleased with themselves. Dawkins’s The God Delusion alone, with its compelling argument that God is the ...”

“... collapses into a company of picnickers. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris motored up to his chosen summit a while ago; and here, sure enough, stepping forward to pat the newcomer on the back and welcome him along, who should it be but Philip Pullman? ‘Magnificent … a sane, courteous and devastating criticism of ...”

“... correlation, and scolds them for their errors about Spinoza, but I find Dawkins and Hitchens (and Sam Harris) companionable, as I find Johnston himself, and feel no resultant stress. Johnston gives ground to no one in his disdain for the idolaters – all ordinary believers – and there’s a great deal to be said from his perspective that can be read ...”

“... Tigers. In his view, the ‘four horsemen’ of the new atheism – Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens and Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith – ride roughshod over the rich history of religion in the name of a ‘pulp fiction’ that ends happily ever after when they’ve argued faith into extinction. He is appalled by ...”

“... One night​ in 1939, 16-year-old Sam Phillips jumped into a ‘big old Dodge’ with his older brother and a few friends a little after midnight and set out to drive from Florence, Alabama to Dallas, Texas to hear a celebrated First Baptist pastor deliver a sermon. At four or five a.m. the boys arrived in Memphis, where they found themselves in a black part of town called Beale Street ...”

“... were quick to absorb the cosmopolitan slang of the New York streets. Simon naturalised his name to Sam and set up business as a tailor out of the same three-room apartment on East 93rd Street that held Minna, her parents and the five boys; but the couple always had an air of waiting for something riper, and improvisation would become the family mood. With ...”

“... Sam​ Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) was one of the first British novels to be written in creolised English. It turned London, as the critic Susheila Nasta has said, into a ‘Black city of words’. The protagonist, Moses Aloetta, is an Afro-Trinidadian who arrived early in the Windrush era. After almost a decade in the city, he has become a reluctant welfare officer for newcomers: ‘All sorts of fellars start coming straight to his room … when they land up in London from the West Indies, saying that so and so tell them that Moses is a good fellar to contact, that he would help them get place to stay and work to do ...”

“... is the result of the joint efforts of Bond, M, Q (Ben Whishaw), Swann and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris). Who ever looked to 007 for displays of teamwork? What would Fleming have made of all this? He would no doubt have been happy that the film’s box-office take has already exceeded $500 million. The title of the new collection of his ‘James Bond ...”

“... work of the high modern years’ – Clifton Cathedral, the work of Richard Gilbert Scott or Sam Scorer – ‘prompts awe. But that awe is more likely to be aesthetic rather than religious; it is not different to that which is incited by a grand hangar or concert hall – the potency of a building is quite distinct from its nobility (or baseness) of ...”

“... to the memory of the heroes … Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris, who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy, April 13, 1873.’ When EJI arrived in Montgomery there were more than fifty memorials of one sort or another to the glories of the Confederacy. They included a gold star on the steps of the state ...”

“... a student at Lincoln University. Much of this early life is caught in a late story ‘Old Mrs Harris’, tapes of which are used to accompany the modern pilgrim round the Cather shrine. At University she settled into literature when a teacher published a paper of hers on Carlyle in the Nebraska State Journal. She was soon reviewing theatrical productions ...”

“... life’, much more data, and more accurate data, was needed. For once, the bureau poster of Uncle Sam – portfolio in hand, accompanied by the emphatic slogan ‘It’s Your America!’ – seemed to make sense.Only a few months later, however, that promise of universal embrace rang hollow. Bouk tells the story of how, as early as September 1939, ‘backroom ...”

“... firmly they told themselves they would return in five or ten years – could they begin to exist. Harris, in George Lamming’s novel The Emigrants (1954), pinpoints this feeling when, setting eyes on England for the first time from a ship’s porthole, he thinks to himself: ‘There was life, life, life, and wherever there was life there had to be something ...”