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“... nurtured; some of these friends, notably the Earl of Oxford and the Queen’s physician, Dr John Arbuthnot, helped protect him from his detractors. After Pope’s death, he found friends among writers who could not have known him. Samuel Johnson’s Life (1781), though often dismissive of poems we now value, strongly countered Warton’s general ...”

“... Parliament for no recognised reason.In his recent Hamlyn lectures, now amplified and annotated, John Baker, the doyen of historians of English law, set out to compare the laws and legal systems of two reigns separated by four centuries and linked ostensibly by nothing more than the name of the incumbent monarch. But the comparison is more than a convenient ...”

“... been called that when he was alive. The villagers called him ‘Pavel’, the proper form of his Christian name, or ‘Pasha’, a diminutive. ‘Pavlik’, another diminutive, was never used until the Komsomol press took it up. When Druzhnikov pointed out obvious contradictions between what they had experienced and the official version, interviewees often ...”

“... grave of Sir Robert Burton. The narrator traps him in the tomb, and masquerading as the avenging Christian, exorcises the holy vandal by terror. The story resounds with nice jokes about national decline and reverse colonialism. And the whole thing hovers on the edge of the utterly ridiculous – one of Theroux’s favourite territories. Not all The London ...”

“... scientists such as Faraday and Helmholtz – not to mention a host of lesser figures such as Hans Christian Oersted, whose work is celebrated in one of these essays. Unification is the Supreme Project of Science, metaphysical and religious in inspiration. Curiosity can only end with an understanding of the nature of all things. The integrity of Einstein’s ...”

“... was inspired at the age of 18 by the Abbé Pierre and the movement of worker-priests and became a Christian and a militant. Those convictions still affect him 47 years later. Apparently unimpressed by the success of New Age cults and American-style evangelism, Virilio fears that we are losing touch with the soul and succumbing to ‘technoscientific ...”

“... Buenos Aires, hoping to fly on across the Andes, there was good news and bad. Michael Brunson and John Humphrys had hired a large plane from Aerolineas Argentinas, on behalf of ITN and the BBC, and they were leaving for Santiago late that night. The new Chilean authorities had promised to open the frontier the following morning, and for a payment of ...”

“... spreads through every member.’ Here surely begins the revulsion against the asceticism of the Christian tradition, which had begun with St Jerome and his praise of alousia, the state of being unwashed: ‘He who has once bathed in Christ has no need of another bath.’ The practical result was that baths, variously described as Turkish, Roman and ...”

“... regime and Western penetration of its empire, began in late 1851. Fuelled by a combination of Christian and Buddhist millenarianism and led by Hong Xuiquan, the product of a Christian missionary education, who declared himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ, the rebellion exemplified a new world of ideological ...”

“... In 1548, four years after the Princess finished the translation, it was published by the Reformer John Bale, one of Elizabeth’s mentors, under the purposively improved title, A Godly Meditation of the Christian Soul. Bale had his reasons, as Shell shows, and he encoded them (nothing was then written entirely en clair, it ...”

“... mixing ‘Marxism, narcissism and paganism’, a realisation of the ‘dystopian fantasy of John Lennon’. Talk of ‘white culture’ under threat lit up social media. Commentators wondered if a radical right-wing vision of politics defined by ‘faith, family and flag’ was taking root in the UK. By then, I was long gone. The press officer came ...”

“... the patron saint of this pagan Christianity. Majestically, Augustine spent much of his life as a Christian applying his superbly lucid and restless mind to the hazard of human sinfulness, the release of redemption and the agency of God. Crudely put, his massive attempt, derived from the certainty that God is only good and cannot create anything evil, was to ...”

“... which appeared in early 1959 only two months after the Hanover show, the artist and critic John McHale alludes to Rudolf Arnheim, who first applied Gestalt theory to art, and cites Paul Schilder on the ‘fragmentary associations’ that we fold into our body images. Similar reflections on the infantile development of the corporeal imago had been made ...”

“... overdue attention. Lawrence’s enemies still deny his comedy, which was often self-deprecating. John Carey, who wants all writers to be nice (ideally, as decent as Arnold Bennett), wrote a book about the nastiness of various modern writers called The Intellectuals and the Masses. In it Lawrence is scolded for his ‘fascism’, his ecstasies of ...”

“... wedding anniversary. Joan Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo, was married at the Cathedral of St John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue in New York in 2003. Dates are important. In a writer as fastidious as Didion they carry a lot of weight. Detail matters too, sometimes more than the main thing, or instead of it: Seven years ago today we took the leis from ...”