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“... in fifty words is not worth including. To invoke a more constructive example, the makers of the Christian creeds showed how pregnant economy – ‘crucified, dead and buried’ – could get around the problem. A further alternative would be to adopt the stylised format of Who’s Who or Debrett (Henry VIII, 2nd s of Henry VII, qv, S 1509: m 1st, Catherine ...”

“... Ruskin’s biography they mean a great deal. Briefly, the story is of Ruskin’s acquaintance with John and Maria La Touche, whom he probably met in 1858, four years after the annulment of his marriage; his growing love for their younger daughter Rose; his realisation that his feelings for her were romantically loving; his proposal of marriage in 1866; her ...”

“... and takes a chance on ‘wilderness’; the coloniser blindly penetrating new territory; the Christian having a first unmediated encounter with Creation. ‘Glory pulsed in her gut; she, a nobody, a nothing, going farther than any man of Europe had yet gone in this place so new to their eyes.’ Suddenly, Groff’s premise seems not so much sparse as ...”

“... other canonical poet of the English language, with the possible exception of his great antagonist John Milton, he was conscious of the previous uses by other writers of the words he deployed in his poems. But what exactly is the difference, one can’t help wondering while reading such notes, between an interesting allusion or echo and a mere verbal ...”

“... The Bounty saga, featuring Banks’s breadfruit again, is wrapped up in six pages. Bligh and Christian, old shipmates, are declared ‘heterosexual’, and we are reminded that Bligh eventually completed his mission, and that ‘AFRICA’S dark sons’ in the West Indies thought the breadfruit not worth the trouble. Gavin Kennedy, in Captain Bligh: The ...”

“... children’s book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published in 1950. His standing as a Christian apologist has risen even more remarkably in these years. At the time of his centenary, Christianity Today announced that he had come to be ‘the Aquinas, the Augustine and the Aesop of contemporary evangelicalism’, a list suggestive of deep ...”

“... ones so that the territory on the wrong side of the line would nonetheless be Spanish, and Christian. The thrust of these first inventors of an idea of the South Sea was towards hegemony and ownership, and it did not change greatly over the next 350 years. The rites of possession by empires were repeated over and over. Turning the sod, burying pennies ...”

“... from the Stalin Peace Prize which he had won the year before was icing on a substantial cake. John Butler is a Canterbury man and an emeritus professor at the University of Kent, best known for his book The Quest for Becket’s Bones. The dean now and then compared his own struggles for truth with those of St Thomas, though the dean’s bones and indeed ...”

“... popular legend is that the BOP was a long-term bestseller. But as McAleer shows, locked into its Christian and anti-masturbation propaganda mission, the RTS weekly was almost immediately overtaken by the more market-responsive publications of the commercial publishers. By 1900, ten years after its launch, the BOP was a lame duck, subsidised by the RTS, and ...”

“... especially, and valuably, proficient in Coptic, a language that had devolved since the early Christian era into a purely liturgical medium but which was known to be continuous with ancient Egyptian, and, in its written form, used letters of the Greek alphabet along with signs it had taken over from the old Egyptian cursive script. It was by extrapolating ...”

“... nothing can be different than it is. Spinoza made it clear that he was not talking of the Judaeo-Christian deity, but a purely philosophical being. He then worked out a stoic-like ethical system in which the highest good for man is to see the world from the aspect of eternity, and to achieve the intellectual love of God. As Richard Mason reminds ...”

“... recently with a Cabinet Minister will know that it is not just the labourer who is thus incapable. John Buchan, whose grandson I am, was a late and flesh-and-blood representative of that lost epoch before economic expediency: a writer who not so much rejected the division of labour (Baudelaire and the Romantics do that) as overcame it. He fascinated his age ...”

“... of Greek and Roman art. Ned’s chief assistant in this enterprise was the great love of his life, John Marshall. The two met at Oxford, where Marshall was an outstanding student. Many of his contemporaries believed that the young man might become a great Classical scholar, but he chose to serve as Ned’s secretary. He received a regular salary, but he was ...”

“... more mocking posture, in another century and in another country, assumed by the American president John Adams: “It will never be pretended that any person employed . . . had interviews with the gods, or was in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven.”’ Wittreich spends the rest of the paragraph glossing Adams, and then moves on. Notice how his ...”

“... to the Roman people at the dedication of the Lateran Church that Constantine built’ (i.e. St John Lateran), and Sylvester, in the robes of papal office and attended by servants with holy vessels. True, the sculptor had failed to enter the year when all this happened. But the quality of the carvings, which resembled the crude reliefs on the Arch of ...”