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“... There​ is a long history of Europeans bringing buildings to California. A Christian mission has stood in some form or other at San Diego de Alcalá since 1769, testifying to the colonial expansion of the Spanish up the Pacific coast. Seventy miles further north, a few original elements of the sweeping church at San Juan Capistrano still stand, despite a massive earthquake in 1812 which destroyed much of the Baroque edifice ...”

“... it’, as well they might. Such stories might seem far away from modern science, but according to William Eamon they hold vital clues to the course and meaning of the Scientific Revolution. The quick-witted medical improviser was Leonardo Fioravanti, an eminent ‘professor of secrets’, one of a number of Renaissance writers who traded on their reputation ...”

“... should say ‘witted’ criticism. Should he continue in this direction, he will soon sound like William Empson, the Keeper of the Seven Seals in this area, a great critic posing as a terrible poet, who was apparently content to commit lines such as ‘Project her no projectiles, plan nor man it.’ It is bewildering that Hill, once so richly lyrical, should ...”

“... Kathy Acker, wild and woolly avatar of William Burroughs, is also one of the Blasted Allegorists, contemporary American artists whose self-important and talent-free doodles about Life, the Universe and Everything are hyped by Brian Wallis in his Introduction, a piece of writing conceivably worse than the pieces it introduces: For the writers in this book, these critical forms, such as interviews, monologues, jokes, dream narratives and parables, oppose the imposed narrative structure, the unquestioned hierarchy of characters, and the easy closure of much conventional – or even modernist – literature ...”

“... to our understanding of those tendencies than she thinks. It is from Calvin’s institutes of the Christian Religion that Manning derives what she calls the ‘puritan-provincial vision’, a world-view characterised by its embrace of contradictory absolutes: the innocence of faith and the torments of self-examination, acceptance of arbitrary predestination ...”

“... Elizabeth’s court, like his patron Sir Christopher Hatton, and the ‘Catholic’ Anglicanism of William Laud and after; and if Elizabeth herself had not been so enraged by the Papist-Catholics’ kamikaze attack on her Church, her crown and her person, her own place in that sequence would be more apparent than it is. It is perfectly proper for Williams to ...”

“... curios, the beached experiments, the gatherers of dust: the Latin translation of Paradise Lost by William Hogg, the versions of Spenser’s Shepeardes Calender by Theodore Bathurst and John Dove (both of which experiment vigorously with Latin metrical form), the stately Latin transformation of Absalom and Achitophel by Francis Atterbury. David Money’s ...”

“... uncovered an ancient discussion of male menstruation. The idea of male menstruation is part of the Christian tradition of seeing the Jew as inherently, biologically different. Thomas de Cantimpré, the 13th-century anatomist, calling on St Augustine as his authority, presented the first ‘scientific’ statement of this phenomenon. Male Jews, he ...”

“... within the closed circle of their fellow initiates, but they also followed F.D. Maurice, the Christian Socialist and an Apostle of an earlier generation, in thinking it wrong to unsettle other people by too much dwelling on one’s private misgivings. In the end, Sidgwick resigned his fellowship shortly before the repeal of the Test Act made the issue ...”

“... an intellectual of the first rank are two scathing reports transmitted through intermediaries by Christian Huygens. In them he dismisses Hobbes’s claim to have transformed geometry by a number of major discoveries, such as that the value of pi is the square root of ten, as ‘absurd childish nonsense’. Hobbes believed geometry was the queen of sciences ...”

“... of Independence. But then, Emerson never did feel great kinship with vanguard abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, much less with aspiring literary women like Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who brought the injustices of slavery home to ordinary American readers. When, in 1850, Emerson came to support anti-slavery, he did so more from ...”

“... words from a Third Programme broadcast – ‘unconscious satires’ of Mary Shelley’s father William Godwin’s reforming ‘brand of humanism’. A postwar ideal of ‘ethical, germ-free citizens’ became a bit of a bugbear. ‘The Ballad of the Fanfarlo’, a narrative poem written during an access of Baudelairean dandyism ‘c.1951’, is filled with ...”

“... Sir William Jones, the Enlightenment polymath who established the shared origins of Indo-European languages and cultures, certainly didn’t lack a capacity for big vision. But he was also keen on details, with no time for broad-brush talk about the seven ages of man. He was 47 – still in Jaques’s fifth age (‘And then the justice … with eyes severe’) – when he died in 1794, in the fancy Calcutta suburb of Garden Reach ...”

“... to foist their belief systems on the Indians. As Porter points out, the East India Company banned Christian missionaries from operating in the subcontinent. All the same, millions of Indians continued to believe that Christianisation and the destruction of their caste were part of the long-term plan. That fatal misunderstanding was among the underlying causes ...”

“... had reason to speak out. It would be going too far to say that 11 September undid centuries of Christian teaching and made revenge respectable again, just as William Harris is over the top when he opines: ‘In the United States, views about revenge seem to have sunk to a level appropriate to a neolithic village.’ But ...”