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“... II, last of the Spanish Habsburgs: from his dead hands across an ocean, to the bound hands of John Williams, a minister of religion in Deerfield, a small settlement in New England. Europe’s conflicts are echoed and mimicked in this precarious, snow-bound frontier territory. The winter of 1703 to 1704 had been a season of ugly rumour, of a defensive ...”

“... of Elizabeths, Sarahs, Janes and variform Anns (Nancys, Nans and Hannahs), you would have the Christian names of something close to 80 per cent of the female population. There was a similar pattern with Johns. About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the ...”

“... of warfare hope will animate the rank and file, they themselves do not necessarily share them. As John Keegan pungently demonstrates, warfare since tribal times has always been divided more or less unevenly between those who direct it, those who enjoy it (in different contexts and for different reasons) and those who suffer it. This last class would ...”

“... the content of the chapter itself.) Eager to separate the Jesus of history from the Christ of the Christian faith, Mr Carpenter interrogates his texts, as he confidently and frequently tells us, as a historian. In this capacity, he has much of interest to tell those of us who are thinly acquainted with recent New Testament scholarship, and he writes freshly ...”

“... this man go, you are no friend to Caesar; any man who claims to be king is defying Caesar” ’ (John 19.7). Since the 18th century, however, it has been argued that this allegation of a ‘frame-up’ is itself a frame-up – whose victims are the Jews. If Jesus, as many Gospel passages indicate, did indeed claim to be ‘King of the Jews’, is it possible ...”

“... extraordinary travels and his eventual aspirations as a free man – which range from being a good Christian to learning the French horn. Equiano stayed with the godly and genteel Guerin sisters in Greenwich, and took ‘many opportunities of seeing London, which I desired of all things’. He tried training as a hairdresser in the Haymarket, he went to ...”

“... but the ascetic prince ‘Sagamoni Burcan’ (Shakayamuni Buddha) – revered at the time as a Christian saint. As for the khan’s summer capital in China, Shangdu, English readers will know it by a slightly different name: ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan …’ Coleridge said his opium dream had been inspired by a travel book of 1613, Purchas His ...”

“... To ask me to check my Christian beliefs at the public door is to ask me to expel the Holy Spirit from my life when I serve as a congressman,’ declares Mark Souder, a conservative Republican from Indiana, ‘and that I will not do.’ Such affirmations of the legitimacy of religion in the civic sphere are increasingly common in the United States, even among liberal democrats stung by accusations of secularist bias ...”

“... paintings and statues inside the school and outside in the grounds, created a sense that Mary and Christian doctrine were synonymous. She pervaded the story of salvation as I had been told it. As I was – still rather half-heartedly – embarked on writing a book about Mary, I began looking in Vietnam for traces of her cult. The cathedral in Saigon is ...”

“... or any instance of penitential warfare, holy war which justified fighting in defence of the Christian faith with the expectation of spiritual reward’. By this definition, campaigns in Iberia, the Baltic, southern France, Ethiopia, Malta and Rhodes all qualify, whether the ‘enemy’ was Muslim, pagan or Cathar. So do abortive popular movements such ...”

“... to Nobby’s and drink nickel draft beers. As a flaneur at the café he ‘read everyone, from John Fante to Aldous Huxley to Lao-tzu. My favourite novel at the time was Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, about a down-and-out barfly – a bleak omen, in retrospect, of where my life would one day land.’ (The epigraph of Beautiful Things is a few lines from ...”

“... a monument to art’s failure in the face of history, or an attempt to escape history. The critic John Russell saw an earlier form of the work, titled Twenty Years of Solitude (1971-91) as a ‘portrait of the artist as Atlas, bearing upon his shoulders a whole world in epitome’. But despite this the mood remains somehow light, as though a burden has been ...”

“... only a few flying hours away, it may be time to start reflecting on a very different type of tale. John Hu, the Hu in Jonathan Spence’s latest book, was a man without guile, and without luck. He travelled to France from Canton in 1722 as the employee of Jean-François Foucquet, a Jesuit missionary, but behaved in such a bizarre fashion that in 1723 he was ...”

“... 9.1), cleansing lepers (Matthew 8.1-4), feeding thousands (Luke 9.10-17) and raising the dead (John 11.1-43), but I never quite managed any of those, and had to make do with speaking in tongues (Acts 2.4), having visions (Acts 2.17) and receiving words of wisdom (1 Corinthians 12.8) instead.* I was 17 years old when I started. I was from Essex. I’d ...”

“... The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) leader, John O’Leary who, in Yeats’s poem, shared his grave with the corpse of ‘romantic Ireland’, observing that the Brotherhood’s ‘propagandist work was … entirely separatist with practically no reference to Republicanism’. Similarly, and just as ...”