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“... a deal for film rights not far behind; the reason it garnered glowing blurbs from Sandra Cisneros, John Grisham, Stephen King and Don Winslow; the reason it was widely listed in the American press as one of the year’s most anticipated books; the reason Oprah Winfrey selected it for her recently revived book club; and the reason it debuted at the top of the ...”

“... In​ 1607 John Derpier, an argumentative Wiltshire gentleman, was hauled before an ecclesiastical court for publicly proclaiming ‘the most hereticall & damnable opinion (that there was noe god & noe resurrection, & that men died a death like beastes)’. Derpier’s audacity was compounded by the fact that he had made his assertion in a church and in the hearing of the impressionable youth of the parish ...”

“... Thomas Hood in ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, that their despair was the effect of a general lack of Christian charity in the field of social relationships. He illustrated this by invoking the oppressive use of parental or paternal authority, particularly against girls, which had perhaps been encouraged by the Code Napoléon. They were victims, not of Society ...”

“... they were accessible to all who could pay the price of admission. One of the leading characters in John Brewer’s The Pleasure of the Imagination was a visitor to pleasure gardens. Anna Margaretta Larpent was a moderately prosperous lady living in London in the late 18th century, married to the state official responsible for vetting plays before they reached ...”

“... often took the form of amended or interpolated narrative. A well-known example is the early Christian interpretation of the Messianic prophecies of Isaiah, and the way so much that happens in the gospels is said to be ‘according to the Scriptures’. James Kugel, in his book The Bible as It Was, shows that Old Testament interpretation sometimes ...”

“... is marked. The message is even spelled out for the inattentive: Faraday belonged to a small Christian sect, the Sandemanians, and ‘believed firmly that in studying science he was investigating the laws written into the Universe by God.’ This is not the stuff of which arresting exhibitions are usually made. But if Geoffrey Cantor is right in his ...”

“... his fellow diners rise as one to watch the passing of the daily freight train – but in general John Rayburn, as he is called by his Southern pals, finds the easygoing amiability of Guntersville’s close-knit community beguilingly comfortable. Rayburn is in search of the Agrarian ideal as formulated by Allen Tate and friends in the early ...”

“... they are invariably more authoritative, but they certainly demonstrate that around the turn of the Christian era there was a degree of fluidity in the textual status of the books that would soon become canonical. Other texts found at Qumran open a window on a variety of Judaism at this pivotal moment of which we had hitherto no more than glimpses. The texts ...”

“... the batsman’s point of view. Contingency did its satanic worst to get you out, and you did your Christian best to stay in. What, though, if you were some out-of-order soul who chose to look at this vital encounter from the other end of the pitch? One early cricketer who did so was the third Duke of Dorset: ‘What is human life but a game of ...”

“... 31 May 1578, vineyard workers on the Via Salaria in Rome found a tunnel which led them to an early Christian burial site. They had opened the catacombs: the vast network of passages cut through the volcanic tuff outside Rome in which thousands of Christians, as well as Jews and pagans, were buried. The vineyard workers were not the first to spelunk in these ...”

“... religious controversies that gave rise to the Reformation hinged on the interpretation of early Christian and Jewish history. Textual criticism and exegesis here required a knowledge of Hebrew and other Eastern languages, which Scaliger acquired, but also a knowledge of historical time-reckoning and calendar systems, which in turn called for some ...”

“... In his book he describes at length his ‘quest for the historical Judas’, believing that the Christian tradition has misrepresented and maligned the man (the more readily since his name connotes Jewishness) and should admit guilt for having done so. Klassen is insistent that his purpose is to get at the historical truth about Judas, though he is well ...”

“... of the great ‘samers’ of the later Middle Ages was the 14th-century travel writer known as Sir John Mandeville. Written close to home, somewhere in France, his vivid and readable travelogue is nonetheless animated by encounters with the unknown and unexpected: cyclopes, jewel-bearing vines, sheep the size of oxen, people who live under water and the ...”

“... In his Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796), John Gabriel Stedman describes meeting a man who had been a prince in Africa but was ‘surprized, taken, and bound’ while on a raid ‘to revenge his [father’s] death’. Yet some who wrote about the plantations also correctively maintained that, whatever ...”

“... author and publisher’. Idly picking up a pencil, he observed it to be the exact counterpart of John Forster: ‘short, thick, and full of lead’. A luckless would-be comrade once told him that, politically, they were rowing in the same boat: ‘but not with the same skulls,’ Jerrold replied. The most durable relics of his wit concern his fellow ...”