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“... in Arabia but in Libya, and two centuries too early, but no matter: Muhammad was a foil for the Christian preoccupations of the day, heresy foremost among them. Muhammad, in the European imagination, was a repository of heresies: like Arius or Eunomius he thought Christ wasn’t as great as God; like Sabellius, he rejected the trinity; he was polygamous ...”

“... history’ in which political events are a backdrop to his narrative of Christian conversion. On the non-Anglo-Saxon (or native British) side, Gildas wrote about contemporary events in the fifth and sixth centuries in his On the Destruction of Britain, but only to denounce contemporary sinners; and the ninth-century Historia ...”

“... to Christianity but also as a scientific alternative to Theosophy and the healing pretensions of Christian Science. He skilfully, even disingenuously, drew out from the Vedas a faith unblemished by the moral and intellectual shortcomings of Christianity. It didn’t burden individuals with guilt or scare them with the anger of a distant god. It released them ...”

“... In 1919, after prolonged study, the Harvard ethologist William Morton Wheeler pronounced the male wasp ‘an etiological nonentity’. An animal behaviourist had scrutinised the male wasp and found – no behaviour. We can well imagine the male wasp’s response to such a verdict: his initial shock and hurt; his descent into a period of depressed introspection; his eventual decision to improve his act ...”

“... he was impressed by Flemish painting. Later he studied at Ghent and in the Antwerp Academy. Unlike William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or Edward Burne-Jones, Brown profited from a broad and thorough education in the business of painting. Later, his art became a passion and a vocation. But it never ceased to be a job from which a living had somehow to be ...”

“... role. For all Hughes’s throwaway manner and air of untroubled expertise (he sometimes reads like William Empson trying his hand at a tale of adventure), there is, as with Kipling, a kind of innocence which is part of the charm. When Amabel Williams-Ellis, who read the first draft of A High Wind for him, sensibly objected that there could not but have been ...”

“... Biography there are photographs of David Niven, Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his own jokes. Amiable images, devised no doubt to lure us into a placidly ...”

“... pleased with themselves, so convinced that they represented sensibility in its highest form. Then William was always stealing Sam’s ideas and appropriating his contacts, with a never-failing air of disinterested benevolence, and in the sacred name of friendship. Robert Southey, Sam’s great friend, Sara’s brother-in-law, another promising young man in ...”

“... the help of the obituary notice contributed to the Proceedings of the British Academy for 1977 by William McNeill, an American scholar who has a close affinity with his subject. Toynbee was born in 1889 into a family with Evangelical associations; like the celebrated uncle he was named after, his father was a social worker. At Winchester he was trained to win ...”

“... in dorsal trauma. ‘Spinal irritation’ was a popular diagnosis at the time: Henry and William James acquired the disorder to sit out, as it were, the American Civil War. Their plucky sister Alice spent a lifetime in bed on account of her spinal affliction, the ‘dorsal trouble in the blood’ which ...”

“... spot him as a winner?’ Naomi Mitchison asked in one of the earliest reviews. A few months later William Empson wrote at some length about ‘Paid on Both Sides’. He was impressed by Auden’s ability to make ‘psychoanalysis, surrealism, and all that’, all the irrationalist tendencies ‘which are so essential a part of the machinery of present-day ...”

“... as its lord president. Cooke was appointed solicitor-general to assist the attorney-general, William Steele, in the prosecution; but Steele became suddenly ‘very sick’ when the prosecution brief was ready to be delivered. Cooke and Bradshawe, both of them nervously aware of what they were undertaking, stayed the course; and so it was that the first ...”

“... an amalgam for which a succession of ill-defined terms are used: seigneurialism, traditionalism, Christian stewardship, organicism and above all, paternalism. Sidestepping any precise definition of slavery, the Genoveses deal not with what the slaveholders were defending but with how they defended it. One finishes Slavery in White and Black not knowing what ...”

“... has been temporarily usurped or infringed by a new male cult whose founding fathers were Cromwell, William of Orange and Edward Carson, and whose godhead is incarnate in a rex or caesar in a palace in London.‘The fury of Irish Republicanism is associated with a religion like this,’ he had said a year or two earlier, referring to the Mother Earth paganism ...”

“... more offensive than some of the early Church heresies, and has transparent similarities with early Christian mysticism. In Twilight in Italy and Apocalypse, for instance, the Christian, trinitarian pattern of the thought is clear – along with the desire for a religious resting-place, a balance of opposites. One can take or ...”