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“... of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’.But Greene had some misgivings. ‘The subject of the book,’ he ...”

“... Perhaps, compared with J.G. Farrell’s previous three novels, The Hill Station (as its editor, John Spurling, decided to call it) might be termed ‘light’, but only in that the writing is less dense, less effortful in the reading, than is the case with the Irish Troubles and, more markedly, with The Singapore Grip. Jane Austen comes to mind, and not ...”

“... In her speech accepting the Premio Galileo Galilei, which opens the second volume, she credited John Florio, a brilliant promoter of Italian learning in 16th-century London, with introducing her not only to Giordano Bruno but also to ‘members of the Warburg Institute, then newly arrived in London with their wonderful library’. In her dealings with past ...”

“... Denis: ‘Marnie – wig, smell and all’; ‘Sam Smith, MP for Flint and religious bore’; ‘John Bulman, tutor, whisky lover and cheat’; ‘The misery of picnics’; ‘The Palship, dressed to kill ... ’ In triumphant contrast, there is: ‘Myself at 11, fisherman, child musicologist and budding atheist’. A Welsh Childhood is also strengthened by ...”

“... Saint-Denis, a boy of 12 begins to preach. He has received word from God that it is the mission of Christian children to free the Holy Land from the infidel. He draws crowds, draws followers: boys and girls swarm from street and field. God is their Pied Piper. They march the roads of France, exalted, unstoppable, expecting a miracle at every turn in the ...”

“... an intellectual of the first rank are two scathing reports transmitted through intermediaries by Christian Huygens. In them he dismisses Hobbes’s claim to have transformed geometry by a number of major discoveries, such as that the value of pi is the square root of ten, as ‘absurd childish nonsense’. Hobbes believed geometry was the queen of sciences ...”

“... pure’ and so on. Among her appealing period snapshots are notes on a visit to the poet laureate, John Masefield, ‘an absolute poppet’ whose dining room was so cold that she stopped for a double rum on the way home. And here and there you can see her sharpening her ideas in unlikely places. Her notion of a style ‘which makes its impact a fraction later ...”

“... lover’s heightened sense of the beloved resides the divine. For writers eager to reconcile their Christian beliefs with an art committed to human relationships and the things of the world, Williams expressed a creed that justified their position. He prided himself on being the only person who could claim the friendship of those arch-enemies C.S. Lewis and ...”

“... Nonetheless a driving clarity of exposition pushes them along, these models of pre-Reformation Christian consensus and academic agreement on what constituted ‘Roman’ style. As we now feel about the early 20th-century modernists, so Charles’s court must have felt about the High Renaissance: in awe of an optimism still resonant but now ...”

“... they did to his hagiolaters. To the charge that More had an unnatural fondness for torture (when John Tewkesbury, a London leather merchant and Protestant, was incinerated after torture in 1531, More – by then lord chancellor – imagined ‘a hot firebrand burning at his back, that all the water of the world will never be able to quench’), one recent ...”

“... is-ness of you to me is like the is-ness of God,’ he told her. But Hilda was a Christian Scientist who did not approve of birth control devices. They had two children, but her husband felt inhibited from loving her ‘completely’ as he put it, even though she was ‘the most revealing person of essential joy that I know’. After several ...”

“... turn the matter into a stamping-ground for weird fancies and fantasies. This has been a tendency. John Heath-Stubbs called West Penwith         a hideous and wicked country, Sloping to hateful sunsets and the end of time.A painter friend of Marsden’s ‘watched low clouds drift in over the sea and felt that each one was smothering her, wrapping her ...”

“... Grave’. It leads to a blunt stone plinth with a round boulder on top and a plaque commemorating John Flynn (1880-1951), a Presbyterian minister who was sent by his church to the Northern Territory in 1912 to investigate conditions in the bush. His report was grim, describing poor communications and scant healthcare. In 1928, with the pedal-powered radio ...”

“... equally. The growth of religious fanaticism in Israel must, I think, be connected to retrograde Christian passions in Lebanon, Islamic emotions in Egypt and elsewhere. I am not interested in determining which of the three religions is less tolerant, but it is a historical fact that Israel, founded in 1948, is the first quasi-theocratic state in the Middle ...”

“... in God’s eyes. It is equally easy to imagine a subsequent darkening of the plain – the old Christian reverence for simplicity yielding to the carceral project of modernity, Foucault’s great confinement. Go back to the ‘reversible world’ of the late Middle Ages, however, and you will find that real idiots are remarkably absent from inverted ...”