Search Results

“... Years ago Sir John Plumb declared: ‘The past is dead.’ He didn’t add: ‘long live history.’ But try as historians will to put the past behind them, others are always resurrecting it and abusing it for their own purposes. Take the mindless mouthings of ‘Victorian values’, the ‘good’ (or the ‘bad’) old days, the Dunkirk spirit, the ghost of Ramsay MacDonald – in all such sloganising, the ghosts of the past are conjured up to clinch arguments about the present ...”

“... who’d ignored it earlier. I left then, for England; and my parents moved the next year to the Christian suburb of Bandra (one of the train stops at which a bomb went off on 11 July), an area on the brink of transformation in 1984, but still possessed by, and offering, a sort of enchantment. My parents lived here for five years before selling their flat ...”

“... with Roman Catholicism, to the extent that in the late 20th century, in the person of Pope John Paul II, it took charge of the latest episode in the history of a reactive, not to say reactionary, Counter-Reformation. One of the great merits of MacCulloch’s book is that it teaches us that all this, not to speak of what happened in Hungary and ...”

“... point, in received accounts of the word, a villain is wheeled on: the German psychiatrist Johann Christian Heinroth (1773-1843). Heinroth is a complex and disturbing figure in the history of psychiatry. He was influenced by Christian pietism, idealist philosophy, particularly that of Schelling, the work of ...”

“... where the expressive word, spoken or written, still seemed paramount – beneficiaries of what John Bayley once called “the inevitable solace that right language brings”. We were all, in varying degrees, sociable yet solitary.’It was a bold assertion. She was not only young, and relatively unproven, but the wrong gender; she was pushed right up ...”

“... movements were appearing in virtually every major religious tradition. In America, the New Christian Right challenged and temporarily checked the steady secularisation of politics. Commenting on the growth of evangelical and fundamentalist churches, Peter Berger, doyen of Weberian theorists, was forced to admit that ‘serious intellectual ...”

“... bull, either, but a scrub belonging to her tenant’s sons. It is not the hardness of Christian realism that prescribes the widow’s undeserved death but the logic of fiction, and there one must leave it, as one also leaves ‘Good Country People’, with a satisfied sense of form but unconvinced (in the case of the latter story) that the ...”

“... only in the South. The government sought to destroy King’s reputation. With the authorisation of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the FBI listened in on his phone calls with close associates and planted informers in his circle. Convinced the civil rights movement was a communist plot, J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men gathered recordings of his trysts with women ...”

“... Still less could they claim that the French war was undertaken in defence of an ungodly and anti-Christian policy. The comparison suggests that religious discontent, added to an otherwise unchanged constitutional amalgam, could be a very powerful catalyst indeed. There is no parallel here to the cobbler of Hertford in 1640, who, hearing a man call the Scots ...”

“... In this instance, the Bible as a book was an effective instrument of change. The Gospel of John puzzles Schniedewind, as it does most of us. ‘John’s own written work,’ he writes, ‘began by defining the true Word as a person, not a text: “In the beginning was the Word (...”

“... as a reaction to various problems.’ Some SS reports refer to Jews as ‘useless mouths’ and Christian Gerlach, in his pathbreaking work on Nazi food allocation, has concluded that the Holocaust was a part of ‘starvation policy’: a ‘means’ of managing broader economic interests. Götz Aly and Susanne Heim have been struck by concerns about ...”

“... not a surprise that his first and last LRB pieces were about Christianity. Not because he was a Christian (he wasn’t: ‘a faint absenteeist affection’ for the Church of England was all he could muster), but in part at least because he loved stories, in particular stories that came with many variations and inconsistencies, biblical stories. ‘The charm ...”

“... to fit into the timeframe defined by a single year. History rarely can. That is the problem with Christian Caryl’s fascinating and frustrating book, which identifies 1979 as the year that gave birth to the 21st century. Caryl builds his case around five overlapping stories, four about individuals and one about a country. The people are Thatcher, Deng ...”

“... saviour who comes in person to pay off Rosewell and lead them out of indentured servitude is Elder John Bennett: tall, hale, in his thirties – all paternal benevolence and capable masculinity. When Harley and his brother Pence first meet him, they are helping in the hog abattoir. The animals are lowered into barrels of almost boiling water to be scalded for ...”

“... of Europe’s Jews. Many more Palestinians were killed by the Jordanian Army and Lebanon’s Christian militias than by the Israelis at Deir Yassin. In August 1976, at the Tel el-Za’atar refugee camp in Beirut, Christian militias put to death between two and three thousand Palestinians. They completed the butchery ...”