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“... It has been said of the early Christian Irish that they were very interested in their history, but preferred it in the form of fiction. If one English reaction to his observation is likely to be that things have not changed much in the Emerald Isle, another ought to be that their own self-satisfaction is misplaced ...”

“... family of a brain-dead young woman from ending her life support, and opened the nation’s first Christian prison. They could have picked Mike Huckabee, the guitar-playing Arkansas radio preacher – ‘I didn’t major in math. I majored in miracles, and I still believe in them, too’ – and former governor who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008. Huckabee ...”

“... American realism, once a belief, is now an idle liberty. Writers such as Robert Stone, Joan Didion, John Irving and even Don DeLillo, are praised for their ‘realism’, for the solidity of their plots, the patience of their characterisation, the capillary spread of their social portraits, the leverage of their political insight ...”

“... blood libel’, which as late as 1900 in Central Europe put Jews on trial for the ritual murder of Christian children. Bloch also firmly maintained, and Bristow concurs, that anti-semitism was a cause rather than a consequence of white slavery. That is, if either the Tsars or the commissars of Russia had been less concerned to discriminate against their Jewish ...”

“... days about convincing or converting others. In his early New York years he was much taken with the Christian existentialism then flourishing, and especially by Kierkegaard (who provided a valued philosophical schema with his aesthetic-ethical-religious triad). Zahl und Gesicht, a work by the exiled Austrian philosopher Rudolf Kassner, was among the books he ...”

“... among patriot leaders for his shabby dress. He was the antithesis of his vain and ambitious cousin John Adams, a patriot of a more conservative kind who later became America’s second president. Revolutionary politics, however, was the making of Samuel Adams. He was assumed to be the remote master of ceremonies at the Boston Tea Party in December 1773; and ...”

“... I was hired​ as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print ...”

“... on fantasy, as the best intelligence service in the world – an image reinforced by novels like John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl and Agents of Innocence by the American writer David Ignatius. In recent years, however, a number of scandals have badly tarnished the reputation of Israel’s security services and stimulated calls for greater public ...”

“... of the Jews’. The bubble was burst in 1963 by Rolf Hochhuth’s sensational play, The Deputy: A Christian Tragedy. This clunky five-hour drama about the Holocaust portrayed Pacelli as an icy and calculating schemer, heartlessly indifferent to the fate of the Jews, intent instead on protecting Vatican financial interests and maintaining Nazi Germany as a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... An owl and a scarab are among the images that gesture towards iconographies other than the Christian. Inside, the dream-like sensation of being in a place at once familiar yet oddly re-ordered continues with an architecture that speaks an ancient language with a curiously individual intonation. If its precise meaning is hard to catch, there is no doubt ...”

“... a problem as Heaney’s family grew and grew up. To one of his touchiest correspondents, the poet John Montague, he confessed in 1976: ‘I’m in a furious mess over the housing question. This place is a hellhole because of lack of space … The launderette in Wicklow has closed down, so Marie washes for four of us and herself in the bath.’ The life of the ...”

“... ways, New Labour is less like Labour used to be than it is a British version of Europe’s various Christian Democrat parties. If we think of it in that way at least we run less risk of being confused by the evident historical discontinuities. Tony Blair is, obviously, the crucial figure in this transformation. But he is not alone. His key colleague is, also ...”

“... a verbal inventiveness greater than that of James Joyce. This is to demean by overstatement, as John Stuart Mill famously demeaned Harriet Taylor in his Autobiography by his reckless eulogising of her.Hélène was also accused by those who had known the pre-war Althusser as a decorous lycéen and good Catholic of having turned him after 1946 into an ...”

“... suffering has any special purpose in the divine scheme, thereby seemingly reducing the crux of Christian theology to vacousness. Pain appears to have become an embarrassment. Yet even if we don’t philosophise about it these days and have outgrown decadent Fin de Siècle glamorisation, in our daily dealings it remains as important as ever. It’s pain ...”