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“... methods, which the author acknowledges as springing from ‘a personal interpretation of a Christian faith’. In 1950 he was elected to Parliament and experienced a sudden immersion in the politics of intrigue. Within a year Benn was a proto-Bevanite, but by April 1954, he was acting as ‘producer, script reader, personal private secretary, PPS and ...”

“... consequence of reading this terminal record. He is not in the least uncharitable about the Christian books he devours, but he finds equally irrelevant the ‘atheists who wear dog-collars’, and the robust believers like C.S. Lewis who ‘domesticate the supernatural’. His own Christianity seems in some sense as necessary and logical for life ...”

“... different from her conjugal rights in the usual sense. She does not appear to have had any sort of Christian view of sexuality: her classical authors were quite enough for her. Some of them were Stoics, but her attitude to Abelard’s castration was not at all stoical. She was altogether a powerful and surprising person. Clanchy thinks she turned him into a ...”

“... stage-managed by Scott) – opposite the playbill for a production in 1823 of Shakespeare’s King John at the Theatre Royal, which boasted an ‘Attention to Costume never before equalled on the English Stage’. A playbill for a production of Shakespeare’s ‘King John’ in 1823. The century before Scott’s The ...”

“... over her own want of presence of mind’, and we sense the denial of feelings hidden from herself. John Wiltshire’s finely observed study of Jane Austen’s six completed novels is all about the way she conjures characters’ hidden feelings. His title might lead you to expect some revelation of Austen’s private passions but, while knowledgable about her ...”

“... nebulous enemy from the other side of the world. It could be Bob Dylan performing his ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ (‘I discovered there was red stripes on the American flag’); but the year is 2002, and the song is ‘Talkin’ Al Kida Blues’ (‘Cuba’s our enemy, unless we need a prison camp’). Al Kida is the name of a man who lives ...”

“... return. Later Christians gradually developed this idea into what became the standard two-stage Christian understanding of the afterlife. The original apocalyptic promises were never abandoned but indefinitely deferred. In the meantime, each person would face judgment at death. The saved went up to heaven in the sky. The old chthonic kingdoms of the dead ...”

“... cruel and unenlightened Catholic zealots. Thomas Eakins visited Spain in 1869, followed later by John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and others, bringing back visual and written descriptions of a country they thought both colourful and charming. The ‘Spanish craze’ reached epidemic proportions in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of ...”

“... those millions of words, enough is left of their character to dispose of his, beginning with the Christian rectitude so revered by Mrs Whitehouse and other latter-day moralists. It was humbug. Reith was a great one for church-going, publicly invoking God’s help and inviting everyone, from his sweethearts to ministers of state, to kneel with him and pray ...”

“... for a more discriminating understanding of the texts. Both taught and published in America. John Unrau and Jeanne Clegg have enabled us to see Ruskin’s relations with Venice in a new light: one works in Canada, the other in Italy. Important collections of correspondence (Bradley’s editions of the letters from Venice and the Cowper-Temple ...”

“... royal house of David and beyond, but it does so through his putative father, Joseph; St Luke and Christian doctrine insist that his true father was of yet higher rank. The Christian myth is the classiest ‘family romance’ of all. For the most part, Dr Liebert marks his speculations very fairly as such. They are ...”

“... One of John McGahern’s stories begins thus: ‘There are times when we see the small events we look forward to – a visit, a wedding, a new day – as having no existence but in the expectation. They are to be, they will happen, and before they do they almost are not: minute replicas of the expectation that we call the rest of our life ...”

“... of individual possessions, money and exchange, he derived general principles from the primitive Christian idea that the earth was a common treasury. He sometimes called for the abolition and redistribution of private property, sometimes for the free use of unplanted wastelands, and sometimes more narrowly for the distribution of confiscated Crown and Church ...”

“... of Ethics, a work that philosophers still mine, and the model for modern masterpieces such as John Rawls’s Theory of Justice and Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. But Sidgwick was one of those terrifyingly hard-working Victorians whose day job was a small part of what they got through, and although his moral philosophy gets very adequate treatment ...”

“... black hair and dark moustache, produced a quirky resemblance to Lenin. Although his biographer John Bew finds the likeness ‘somewhat forced’, he notes that contemporary observers as different in their politics as George Orwell and the Daily Mail made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David ...”