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“... Roman Jakobson and Mikhail Bakhtin agree on so little as theorists of literature that they must count as alternatives. To read one and then the other, preferably Jakobson first and then Bakhtin, as a sort of anti-Jakobson, is a literary theoretical education. Where Jakobson is dry, Bakhtin is convivial; where Jakobson is technocratic, Bakhtin is impulsive; where Jakobson is magisterial, Bakhtin is a groundling ...”

“... views I had assumed to be rigid, and by its tardiness. Scargill was the only child of an adoring Christian mother and a mild-mannered Communist father, himself a miner. Since becoming famous, Scargill has evinced a remarkable tenderness towards his mother and insisted on his devastation, at the age of 18, when she died. Sensitive, quite possibly bullied by ...”

“... be an elegant entertainment; it also turned out to be, while audaciously tolerant, a distinctively Christian collection. As Bradbury does not say, Sterne left his own droll memoir of his afternoons with the wits and atheists in A Sentimental Journey, which, apart from anything else, is a brilliant comedy of the miscommunications of the French and the ...”

“... made before him, against the degradation of native life which had set in, first with the coming of Christian missionaries to the islands early in the 19th century, and then with the onset of a colonial administration. The Maoris had begun to die out, destroyed physically by European diseases they had no immunity against and spiritually by an imposed morality ...”

“... the 1960s and 1970s, in books like Geoffrey Ashe’s The Quest for Arthur’s Britain (1968) and John Morris’s The Age of Arthur (1973). Professional historians have long been embarrassed by the whole thing, but the image created – Roman cavalry leader rallies the British after the Roman army withdrawal and fights off hordes of invading Angles and Saxons ...”

“... tried to browbeat Cony into submission, then threw him in prison. Cony’s lawyer, the eminent Sir John Maynard, demanded that he be set free, and the judges in the case were minded to release him, invoking the provisions of Magna Carta against imprisonment without trial. The Great Oliver then committed Maynard to the Tower, summoned the judges and told them ...”

“... attention. The most notorious rake of his age spent the last few months of life in discussion of Christian doctrine. A poet who could not have been more urban in outlook lay dying in the depths of Oxfordshire; he had once said that he could behave only in the country, and that when he got as far as Brentford on his return to town, ‘the devill entred into ...”

“... the recording had been a rush job for George, occupying four days between two singing dates with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers. Edward asked him to undertake the job because they had both been collectors of Surrealism. Edward had been a collector of Dali and Magritte on a scale that can be called patronage; George made a faultless selection of Magrittes from ...”

“... took it for granted that the Koran was not the word of God, and therefore hunted for Jewish and Christian influences. They also discovered Syriac and Greek loan words in the text. They read it looking for insights into the mind of Muhammad. Although Weil, Nöldeke and most of the Orientalists who came after them assumed the Koran to be a purely human ...”

“... room where the soldiers were incarcerated became known – was written by one of the survivors, John Zephania Holwell, and stressed that the nawab had given his word that ‘no harm should come to us’: the deaths, Holwell said, were the ‘result of revenge and resentment’ on the part of the guards. Later accounts, however, claimed that Siraj was ...”

“... camp personnel, Gestapo and police, or participants in the ‘euthanasia’ programme). No wonder John McCloy, the generally patient American High Commissioner, complained about the ‘abysmal ignorance’ displayed by many who wrote to him. Frei brings out very well the pathos that attached to incarcerated former members of the Wehrmacht, and the ...”

“... the horror. No sooner had Scotland failed to qualify than I was moved to treat my friends to John Steinbeck’s comment to Jacqueline Kennedy: ‘You talked of Scotland as a lost cause,’ he said, ‘and that is not true. Scotland is an unwon cause.’ Bloody hell. Better make mine a double. Five minutes later I was thinking about Ireland and five ...”

“... and married, despite considerable opposition, the heir apparent. But though Evita may have used Christian symbolism in the formation of her public image – the stories of Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary especially – she did not interfere in doctrinal matters. Theodora, on the other hand, took a great interest in ...”

“... to Nietzsche at several places in this book, and oftener still to another 19th-century fulminator, John Ruskin. The Veronese essay concludes by hailing the pair as ‘necessary madmen’. Imagine an authorial stance that straddles the two: one that tilts here towards the impassioned granularity of Ruskin’s picture-examining and there towards the swingeing ...”

“... the grotesque links forged by zealots between animals and Jews, those other ‘others’ in Christian Europe), to the development of pet-keeping at home, pet-killing in contemporary animal shelters, and attitudes towards wildlife among today’s industrial nations. This last contribution upsets some national stereotypes and confirms others: Germans have ...”