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“... Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell united in their distaste for the robust feminist arguments of John Stuart Mill. ‘In short, J.S. Mill’s head is, I dare say, very good, but I feel disposed to scorn his heart,’ sniffed Charlotte in a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell. ‘Woman must obey,’ Christina Rossetti wrote in 1879. ‘Her office is to be man’s ...”

“... so passed, in this city of sinister charm (once described by Gore Vidal as ‘the Vatican of the John Birch Society’), in an agony of boredom and irrelevance. And then the ABC News Nightline team, the flagship of supposedly serious coverage, announced that it was vacating its skybox and leaving town. No story. Thus did the grand tradition of Convention ...”

“... At some time in the 1730s Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, Midlothian, wrote down advice on the building of what he called ‘a family house’. This should consist of a central main block and two side pavilions, as a precaution against destruction by fire. ‘The main or chief Body of the House ought to be at Least double the Bigness of each pavilion and may serve chiefly for lodging the Master of the family and the better kind of Guests who come to visit him ...”

“... analytic example. The claims for Joachim (c. 1135-1202) are based on his application of the Christian Trinity to history. Full divine revelation in the world has three stages, of Father, Son and Holy Spirit; the ‘Third Age’ of the Holy Spirit, in concordance with the two previous ages, will come, or is about to come. A development of this scheme by ...”

“... in 1985. Two months after seizing Buckley, the kidnappers struck again. This time the victim was a Christian missionary called Benjamin Weir. In January 1985, Father Lawrence Jenco was captured, to be followed three months later by Terry Anderson. Where was Ollie North all this time? In 1981, he was plucked from the Marines to serve on the National Security ...”

“... There’s a revealing slip near the start of John Banville’s new novel. Ursula Godley, whose husband lies dying upstairs, reflects on her son and daughter: ‘These are the creatures she carried inside her and gave birth to and fed from her own breast, phoenix-like.’ A phoenix can never feed its young because there is only ever one of it at a time ...”

“... which has the world’s largest Muslim-majority population (87 per cent), but also large Hindu, Christian and Buddhist minorities, came close to matching India’s diversity. The Nehruvian discourse of non-alignment, secularism and socialism had been eagerly abandoned in India, but Indonesian newspapers still spoke reverently of Pancasila, the national ...”

“... of public opinion. The Presidential election of 1800, in which Jefferson trounced the incumbent John Adams, witnessed an outpouring of newspaper and pamphlet comment directed against his religious indifferentism. Could he be so sure that an atheist would neither pick his pocket nor break his leg? Soon after his death, a fellow Virginian, ‘Black Horse ...”

“... At bedtime, tears would gather in his blue-bloodshot eyes as he read his favourite poems to us. John Dowland’s ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’ was a favourite. Another was Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me’. Both injunctions not to cry made us cry too, as such injunctions do, the admonishment of the ...”

“... the writings of an unlikely set of predecessors: Edmund Burke, the eccentric Jeffersonians John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, Old School Presbyterian defenders of slavery, T.S. Eliot, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver and ...”

“... died with fortitude and great piety ... The deaths of the 1916 men were told and retold as perfect Christian parables.’ She quotes Conor Cruise O’Brien, who points out that the emphasis on the Catholic nature of the Rising made the partition of Ireland almost inevitable. But she is right to believe that the great turnaround in public opinion about the ...”

“... his unsuccessful father feature regularly in Trumbo’s fiction.) His mother was a strong-minded Christian Scientist, the daughter of a famous sheriff and tracker. Trumbo Snr lost his job at Benge’s and fell terminally ill in 1925; the family moved to Los Angeles and young Dalton – neighbours remembered a ‘busy-assed guy, wound up like an eight-day ...”

“... Life, invented by Milton Bradley in 1860, which was itself a reinvention of Elizabeth Newbery and John Wallis’s moralising New Game of Human Life from 1790. The 18th-century version had a snakes-and-ladders set-up: players were sent forward to maturity when they landed on virtues and back to childhood when they landed on vices. It was unplayably boring; the ...”

“... New Yorker or the Mormon from ‘Taxachusetts’ wins the Republican nomination, fundamentalist Christian leaders have threatened to form a third party. The other frontrunner, Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, is making inroads among his fellow creationists and millennialists, but has deviated from hardline Republican positions on ...”