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“... often waned as Comte’s doctrines were more fully understood (most famously in the case of John Stuart Mill, whose early admiration for Comte’s phenomenalism and rationality gradually gave way to revulsion at his dogmatism, religiosity, ‘moralism’ and hostility to personal liberty). Nevertheless, prominent 19th-century figures who acknowledged a ...”

“... Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th. Bunyan was born in a cottage on the edge of Elstow, a village near Bedford, in November 1628. His father ...”

“... hard and keen like a hunting animal.’ Here Leo’s daimon is adapting and echoing the words of John Pory, who in 1600 published an English translation of the historical Leo’s La Descrittione dell’ Africa: ‘How many desolate cold mountains and huge drie, and barren deserts passed he? How often was he in hazard to have been captived, or to have had his ...”

“... that one third of the paintings in the National Gallery (and in comparable institutions) are of Christian subjects, though it is improbable that even one third of the people who go to look at them would call themselves Christians. The paintings don’t really belong in Trafalgar Square anyway; at some time in the past they were removed from churches and ...”

“... in 1517, was a centuries-old organisation led by a bishop in Rome, one of the few bishops in the Christian world still formally styling himself by an ancient title once common for a Christian church leader, Papa (‘father’). After the initial shock of the schism Luther precipitated, the Roman papacy rallied much of ...”

“... shows a mill being brought back into use under the eye of God the Father. Christ is emptying St John’s eagle out of a sack into a hopper to join St Matthew’s angel, St Mark’s lion, St Luke’s ox and St Paul with his sword. They are ground into the pure flour of hope, faith and love, scooped up and bagged by Erasmus the miller under the supervision of ...”

“... Our modern, colloquial notion of apocalypse takes its name from ancient Jewish and Christian traditions, in particular the books of Daniel and Revelation, which predict a fundamental transformation of the world, including an end of time and of death. The end of times was often viewed positively, as a defeat of evil and a reward for the ...”

“... With its Arabs, Kurds and Assyrians, its Shia and Sunni Muslims, its three or more types of Christian, Iraq can survive only if it is kept together by main strength. Left to itself, it would fly off into twenty or more pieces, a Lebanon on a big scale. The Ba’athists have spoken for 48 years of the need for a leadership symbol. Nowadays Iraq has a ...”

“... enemies and the appalling vengeance that God’s wrath will bring on them. For the conventional Christian this had all been spiritualised and allegorised away; not for Forman. No wonder he was thrilled by the Apocalypse; no wonder he was convinced of the maleficence of witches, and contemptuous of those like Reginald Scot who tried to stick up for them; no ...”

“... of toleration where Jews could make a home without the cycle of terror that dogged them in Christian Europe’.) Schama rarely gives explicit guidance on the way readers should think about the material he presents. He doesn’t spend much time on theses, arguments, explanations or musings about cause and effect. His stress is on ‘story’, not ...”

“... their families to the coast. The inspiration behind the scheme was George Lansbury, the subject of John Shepherd’s biography, a book as meticulous as it is generous. It is nonetheless timely: just as the prison service has brown-filled this pleasant site, so, too, New Labour has trampled on the radical socialism of which Lansbury was one of the finest ...”

“... that love does the trick: by losing yourself in it, you find yourself. Perhaps this is because the Christian religion is based on a story, a work of art, a novel subject to many interpretations. Could it be that personal identity is only discovered by means of stories and novels, and that this is why philosophers, who seldom or never read them, have been ...”

“... hit the nail on the head. We shall find Ophelia saying a prayer from this corpus: ‘and of all Christian souls, I pray God.’ Greenblatt has also found the ‘hic et ubique’ in another such prayer recorded by a contemporary English Protestant polemist against Purgatory. And, not exactly by the way, there is a liturgical reference, turned up by the ...”

“... civility and sneering.* Anybody who is Roman Catholic is likely to be insulted. Other varieties of Christian fare no better, and unbelievers who only behave as if they were Christians but aren’t are almost worst of all. What honesty required was the abolition of the entire Christian tradition, the great enemy of human ...”

“... the fantasy of universal communion through print. In Baruth’s novel, Boswell’s mad brother, John, follows the two men that Saturday and spies on their conversation. When he hears the boy’s answer to Johnson, he marvels ‘at the ability of the river to teach every man on it, no matter how young, to cant so flawlessly’. This is not the river of life ...”