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“... by Herodotus and Pliny, whose existence, apparently validated by the traveller’s tales of John Mandeville, haunted the medieval imagination, including that of Columbus? If they were in fact rational human beings, in the full sense of these words, why had they never heard of the Christian gospel, which, it was ...”

“... the taxi-driver – who else? – of the death of the American Ambassador. It was August 1968, and John Gordon Mein had been assassinated that morning. This was an abrupt introduction to the complexities of Guatemalan politics, and I merely assumed – with the Vietnam War and the less-publicised Guatemalan guerrilla war of the Sixties well underway – that ...”

“... to witnessing one was to spit, to avoid contamination. In Europe, from the beginning of the Christian era up to the Renaissance, the condition was usually considered a sign of demonic possession, black magic or witchcraft. At best, it was evidence of a wicked character. (Kent to Oswald in King Lear: ‘A plague upon your epileptic visage!’) But there ...”

“... European writers taught that witches formed a spiritual union with Satan, thus perverting the Christian covenant, whereas common people (mostly in England) held the more grossly materialist belief that the satanic pact was sealed by suckling animal-shaped familiars. In New Guinea the Hewa tribe once supposed witches had a flesh-craving foetus nesting ...”

“... boasts of being ‘admired of those that hate [him] most’. ‘A sicke Machiavell Pollititian,’ John Stephens wrote in his Essays of 1615, ‘is a baked meate for the devill.’ No other political theorist has received remotely similar treatment. Hobbes, who came in for a handsome share of vilification from the 1650s, was namechecked as an early exponent of ...”

“... and Antonine principate. The 15th and 16th chapters, which conclude the volume with a survey of Christian history before the victory of Constantine, instantly occasioned a fierce controversy over Gibbon’s evident unbelief and his use of irony to convey it, so that his writings on the history of the Church have been viewed through the glass of this ...”

“... The Rebel Angels, William Golding’s The Paper Men, Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot, and John Updike’s Hugging the Shore. There are also essays on Ring Lardner, on D.H. Lawrence, and on Structuralism, which Lodge as late as 1980 regarded as ‘the most significant intellectual movement of our time’. Such a collection is bound to be of uneven ...”

“... paying a price for it in the form of global warming, acid rain and so forth. Over a century ago, John Ruskin was arguing that Cartesian (‘modern’) thought had destroyed man’s reverence and wonder in the face of the external world, and that the death of God-in-nature would eventually bring the end of nature. Gore’s book is squarely in this ...”

“... For the girl has agreed to adoption: the baby is given to the Smiths of Seattle. They name him John, a choice that Alexie uses to signal a well-meaning lack of imagination, and when John Smith grows up, Indian-born but raised by whites, he will become the chief suspect in the search for the Indian Killer. It’s not an ...”

“... But if the obsequies are awkward, ‘a good death’ in the 17th-century sense, like John Evelyn’s touching description at his mother’s bedside in 1635 – now that is really difficult. One name is common to Rosemary Dinnage’s thanatological anthology of personal views about hopes and fears, and the social-historical essays edited by Ralph ...”

“... have been the emergence of rabbinic Hebrew from Biblical Hebrew towards the end of the pre-Christian era; the complex encounter of Hebrew with Arabic poetry and philosophy beginning in the tenth century; and the early 20th-century revival of Hebrew as a vernacular in the new Zionist settlements, itself preceded – and made possible – by the revival ...”

“... had their own language, their own customs and traditions, and a myth to light their way, a mystic Christian mission on the Dark Continent. They spoke of themselves as the bearers of the light, but in truth they were dark of heart, and they knew it, and willed it so.’ It is Rian Malan’s fancy, which gives great passion to his argument, that ‘very little ...”

“... both a continuity with the past and the country’s essential doubleness: they are a pre-Christian survival in a nation of official and aggressive Greek Orthodoxy, where people say things like ‘Orthodoxy is not a religion but a way of life,’ or believe that the relationship of Jesus to God and the Virgin Mary is a new version of the triangle ...”

“... two hundred and forty American Marines in Beirut in 1983; by the kidnappers of Terry Waite and John McCarthy among others; by the hijackers of the Kuwaiti plane in April, and of the TWA plane in 1985, when an American Navy diver was brutally murdered – an act for which Mohammed Ali Hamadi, a young Lebanese Shi’ite, is currently on trial in ...”

“... practitioners, with his own assistants, and not least with his own even more eminent brother, John. Hunter proffered a sinister materialistic explanation for the anatomists’ psychic violence: ‘the passive submission of dead bodies, their common objects, may render them less able to bear contradiction.’ No finer case exists of just that psychological ...”