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“... it was looking as if both of these sources would soon be exhausted. In 1898, the English chemist William Crookes sounded a Malthusian alarm: the world’s population, he said, would very soon outstrip its food supply. This was a global crisis in the making, but, Crookes warned, it was especially acute for white people: ‘The fixation of nitrogen,’ he ...”

“... religious sensibility certainly survived, to be reanimated in Anglican form in the great phase of Christian writing that spanned Donne himself, Herbert and Vaughan, Milton and Marvell; in each of the three centuries that followed, there emerged in England a different religious poetry, orthodox and unorthodox. But the historians’ negations are helpful, and ...”

“... kept it there. A slightly unlikely but highly qualified member of Our (or Their) Age was William Empson, who went up to Cambridge in 1925 and down again in disgrace in 1929. There are three essays on Empson in this book, and he and his teacher I.A. Richards are in one sense its heroes, variable and (in Empson’s case) not always admirable advocates ...”

“... historical writing as there was on the subject – the work of the Anglo-German economic historian William Otto Henderson was the outstanding instance – tended to focus on refuting the allegations of violence and brutality that had led to the empire’s dismantling and redistribution at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. By the 1960s these arguments were no ...”

“... of his old self, Finkel said it was he. The reporter from the Oregonian said that a man named Christian Longo, who appeared to have killed his wife and three children, was on the run in Mexico, posing as a journalist from the New York Times called Michael Finkel. One might choose to describe the phone call as bad timing, but only if one knows nothing ...”

“... and ambition’. His idealism, however, is threatened by disillusionment. He longs for a purer Christian commonwealth, but doubts ‘faith and charity would be enough to settle religious differences between men,’ and soon admits not only that ‘Reform was being built on an edifice of lies and monstrous brutality,’ but that as Cromwell’s man he is ...”

“... as well have put up a sign reading ‘Coloured not admitted.’A more direct threat came from the Christian right. In his ‘Goodbye Christ’ of 1932, Hughes singled out for opprobrium ‘Saint Aimee McPherson’, a Pentecostal evangelist who had become a media celebrity. His attack didn’t go unnoticed, and in 1940 McPherson orchestrated a picket of a gala ...”

“... Road had previously been occupied by an American draft-decliner and notorious non-inhaler, William Jefferson Clinton. It’s tempting to compare the parallel careers of these two men, both conservative liberals, advocates of small freedoms. Men of the Sixties. Charismatic hustlers with an eye for a deal. Provincials trading on cracker-barrel ...”

“... the kingdom of England itself, but a large proportion testified to pious Anglo-Norman energy after William I’s conquest of England in 1066, resulting in the formation of a diverse range of communities whose distinctive ‘rules’ for communal life were an implied criticism of the monasteries that had gone before. Well-functioning monasteries constantly do ...”

“... was a student of Scientology and Dianetics, bought his daughter a three-year subscription to a Christian Science magazine when she was broke and ill, and dismissed all college professors as ‘a peerage of tin ears’. Salinger’s four books, now handsomely repackaged without advertisement or comment of any kind, were all unfinished in their way. Did ...”

“... of that unrecapturable, possibly mediocre presence, the poet’s wife: whose brother was called William Hathaway, Mr W.H. The prosaic is, in fact, more likely to foster the Dark Lady than events more historically picturesque. That writers have necessarily an interesting life, a belief prompted by the appreciative reading mind, is surely a ...”

“... Jew from Alexandria. He might as well have been. Born in Jerusalem in 1935 to well-off Palestinian Christian parents, he had grown up in the twilight years of multicultural Cairo, where many of his classmates were Egyptian Jews. His piano teacher was Ignace Tiegerman, a Polish Jew who had moved to Cairo in 1931 and founded a French-speaking ...”

“... decision to exempt Christians from his ban on immigrants from Syria, he said on 27 January on the Christian Broadcasting Network that he was merely executing a correction to the law under Obama, when ‘if you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible.’ That statement, if made ...”

“... or at least filled with the dying, he began to collect remains, and had those of his grandparents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, transported from St Pancras Old Church in London to the cemetery of St Mary’s in Bournemouth, where they lie today with his mother, Mary.After a number of ‘thundering influenzas’ late in 1884, the warmer months had ...”