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“... about many religious phenomena though he was, in The Varieties of Religious Experience William James tended to reduce the mystical experiences of medieval women, especially when accompanied by bodily rigidity, swelling or trances, to psychological aberrations. Catholic scholars such as Herbert Thurston also attempted to explain a number of supposed ...”

“... as something that has the causal character of a thing; something that can undergo and do things. Bishop Berkeley’s characterisation of the self as a ‘thinking active principle’ seems as good as any. In this old use, a principle manages to sound like a thing without sounding like a table or a chair. The second claim, that the self is something ...”

“... a treatise in defence of the 1606 Oath of Allegiance imposed on English Catholics by James I, isn’t a scintillating work – ‘It would be swifter to eat it than to read it,’ Rundell jokes – but its significance for Donne can hardly be overstated. Biathanatos and Pseudo-Martyr form an unsettling diptych, a double meditation on the most ...”

“... scare, were, in fact, unable to produce any examples of heretical thought except an errant bishop in France. (William Forbes, who has been casually labelled Arminianist by some modern historians, seems to have been imbued with medieval Augustinianism.) ‘Arminian’ was a useful term of abuse and, along with accusations of incest and ...”

“... Last October James Rogan, a Republican congressman from California, and manager of the impeachment campaign against Clinton, faced the prospect of a tight re-election battle. His district had been targeted by the Democrats. Crucial to the outcome was the largest concentration of Armenian Americans in the US. To garner their 23,000 votes, Rogan – whose only-ever excursion outside the country was a trip to Armenia – proposed a non-binding Congressional resolution condemning the genocide of 1915 ...”

“... met the painter David, an Englishman who had befriended Charlotte Corday at her trial, and Charles James Fox – ‘rather lourd and maladroit’. With the help of a young American, Margaret and Katherine visited Tom Paine, ‘up half a dozen flights of stairs, in a remote part of the town’, and found him making models and playing with his two adopted ...”

“... conversed with you, he look’t into your very thoughts.’ That the corpse of Robert Braybrook, bishop of London (d. 1404) ‘was like a preserved fish: uncorrupted except for the ears and pudenda’. (Aubrey visited after the roof of St Paul’s fell in during the 1666 fire, causing the lead coffins to break open.) Most audible of all, perhaps, is ...”

“... totally foreign to their day to day lives’. Venice-on-Thames. The royal parks, such as St James’s and Hyde Park, began opening to the public in the 17th century, while places like the Bear Gardens south of the river offered food and music, as well as bear-baiting, to more unruly customers. But the observant would have noticed something rather ...”

“... between Proust, Mann, Gide, Genet, Forster, Woolf, Stein, Langston Hughes, Djuna Barnes and Henry James, it may be more accurate to say that the modernist novel is a queer invention with a smattering of heterosexual imitators, many of them notably preoccupied with queer concerns. After the war, the mantle was passed from Vidal, Isherwood, Baldwin and Capote ...”

“... years of forewords, personal statements and reviews, none as explosive as her earlier essays on Bishop and Dickinson, on sexuality and motherhood. They are valuable mostly because they come from the author of those essays and of the poems. The language Rich uses to praise the late June Jordan is typical: ‘She believed, and nourished the belief, that ...”

“... planting the flag in Landsmark’s body. The man who appears to restrain Landsmark in the photo, James Kelly, an anti-busing leader and later a city councilman, was actually trying to prevent the assault. The photos Forman took next show that Kelly interposed himself between Rakes and Landsmark, calming the crowd. Forman’s photograph alone is an inadequate ...”

“... Christian scripture, but eventually lost faith in geology and abandoned his studies to become a bishop. He told a friend in a letter in 1671 that, in truth, nothing was really known about the origins of natural objects such as fossils.Despite Steno’s pessimism, fossils became widely accepted as evidence of the past existence of organisms now extinct. As ...”

“... sources. It is a very good example of the type of specialised study on which Arthur Marwick, James Cronin and Jane Lewis have had to depend while putting together their syntheses. In this case, the omission of Scotland and Ireland might seem uncontentious. Ireland’s was another story. The Scottish narrative would be similar in respect of government ...”

“... were imposed on the textiles India produced, and cheap British cottons flooded the Indian market. Bishop Heber, that acute observer and author of the lines ‘though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile’, reported that ‘the peasantry in the Company’s provinces are, on the whole, worse off, poorer and more dispirited than the subjects of the ...”

“... cento that is Moby-Dick, there is a passage which might be interpreted as Melville’s response to James Barry’s 1776 engraving The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom. In the engraving Andrew Marvell is depicted with Milton, Locke and Algernon Sidney among the mourners at the bier of Britain’s traditional liberties. Across a pond the mourners can see a ...”