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“... organisation anticipated by other Spenceans – and his grouping became the religious sect of ‘Christian Philanthropists’. His efforts were destroyed by the defection of the rough mulatto ex-Methodist, ex-criminal and ex-sailor Robert Wedderburn, who seems to have steered the Spenceans, from his chapel in Soho, much closer to violent insurrection and the ...”

“... of the culture wars and in George W. Bush’s clear identification with the militancy of the Christian Right. Bush plausibly and successfully campaigns as the Christian plain man voicing the grievances of the common people against the pampered liberalism of an elite typified by John Kerry, though both Bush and Kerry ...”

“... active in the New Brutalist wing of the IG, which also included the artists Nigel Henderson, William Turnbull and Magda Cordell, the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, and the critic Reyner Banham. In the late 1980s the Smithsons looked back on the ‘as found’ aesthetic of New Brutalism as ‘a confronting recognition of what the postwar world ...”

“... differed, but their friendship thrived on the differences. Lessing had been brought up as a simple Christian, but he was also a bold and ebullient Theatermensch for whom writing would always involve wearing masks and playing parts. He once remarked that when a poet speaks in the first person, we should remember that ‘this “I” is only rarely his own ...”

“... know, characterise the whole country: very large numbers of Americans are bitterly opposed to the Christian Right and to its association with chauvinist nationalism. Fifty-one per cent of the vote, on a turnout of 59 per cent, represents less than one third of the total electorate. It’s important to remember, however, that in order to do as well as they ...”

“... confessional has much to do with the fact that the priest is present as a representative of the Christian community rather than as an individual in his own right. This is why it doesn’t matter if he is even more sinful than you. Through this normalising apparatus, in Brooks’s view, the hapless confessee is reintegrated into the community and ...”

“... fictional tracts manufactured for the newly-literate poor, the aim is to awaken the child to Christian promise, especially in the light of quite probable premature death. The boys’ writers of the 19th century, from Marryat to Henty, typically sought to arouse male virtue, fearlessness, pride in nationhood and then in empire, and finally achieved, as ...”

“... reaped a prodigious annual return. H.G. Wells said of one of John Jacob’s great-grandchildren, William Waldorf Astor, that he extracted rents ‘as effectively as a ferret draws blood from a rabbit’, though by Wells’s day spending rather than getting had become the most visible Astor occupation. With an exaggerated version of the anglophilia common to ...”

“... Illuminati?’ A further scare followed the disappearance in 1826 of the anti-Masonic campaigner William Morgan. Soon, America had its own Anti-Masonic political party, which held the very first Presidential nominating convention, when, in November 1831, it selected William Wirt of Maryland. Wirt won only one state as a ...”

“... English Channel – Philip II’s failed Armada of 1588 – and ends a century later with another: William of Orange’s invasion flotilla, which brought about the ‘Glorious Revolution’. Both 1588 and 1688 were moments of intense insecurity and both were presaged by the spilling of Stuart blood: the shocking execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587 and ...”

“... through place comes and goes, but when it comes it often has a countercultural bent. The antiquary William Camden called it ‘a new kind of learning’ when he published his topographical history the Britannia in 1586, in a bid to remake local and historic connections severed by the Reformation. A Society of Antiquaries was duly formed, but it was abruptly ...”

“... on Swift’s memorial tablet, a tablet that notably does not contain any mention of the usual Christian consolations – any hope of salvation or another life beyond this one. It is strange because Swift had distanced the satirical writings from his own feelings: they were written in the voices of personae whose attitudes and beliefs had been chosen ...”

“... on a weekly sitcom called The Danny Thomas Show. Danny Thomas was the son of Maronite Christian immigrants from Kahlil Gibran’s village, Becharre, in north Lebanon. His assimilation was so thorough that he took the Al Jolson role of cantor’s son in a 1952 remake of The Jazz Singer. On the show, it fell to Uncle Tannous to expose the Lebanese ...”

“... peoples, the intellectual value of the open air – but the very ideals of antiquity and the Christian tradition that Matthew Arnold had heard ebbing away from Dover Beach a long time before and that had now entirely dissipated. But people kept reading him, and not just in Scotland. None of the books is perfect, some aren’t good at all, and all are ...”

“... At the end of his life, with his reputation already waning, William Dean Howells remarked that he would be remembered for the quantity of his writing, if not for its quality. He had published a hundred books: plays and poetry collections, memoirs and travel essays, novels and novellas. The plays are mostly undistinguished, the non-fiction writings good on the whole, the novels sharply divided between minor and major ...”