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“... got Rousseau into trouble. It did so by explicitly denying most of the central tenets of the Christian faith in the course of a long exposition of natural religion, interpolated as La Profession de foi d’un vicaire savoyard. The creed professed by the humble priest is not a simple assault on Christianity. He confesses himself torn over the divinity of ...”

“... moved, during the early 1940s, from realism to recognisable mythical subjects drawn from Greek and Christian iconography. By 1944, he had embraced the various more private modes, biomorphic figures and schematic ideographs of Surrealist primitivism. In 1946 came the fascinating but short-lived ‘multiforms’, which look as though Rothko had deliberately ...”

“... source of woe. In exile from Marian England and toiling reluctantly as a corrector in Basel, John Foxe said he had never read anything ‘less pleasant, more choppy or more rebarbative’ than Stephen Gardiner’s prose (‘he spirals off so wildly that he needs a Sibyl rather than a translator’); Balthasar Moretus of the Plantin company complained ...”

“... who largely founded Hollywood and ran the studios were thought to embody dangerous foreign or anti-Christian values. Thanks to Henry Ford, the Ku Klux Klan and an abundance of political nativists, mass immigration ended in 1924, but as far as American purists were concerned, the damage had been done. The capital of this polluted nation was Hollywood; the men ...”

“... help him translate the Mille et une nuits back into Arabic. On graduating in 1768, he was hired by Christian VII of Denmark to translate into French the Tarīkh-i Nādirī, which chronicles the depredations of Nadir Shah, a Persian warlord who invaded India in the 1730s, sacking Delhi and fatally destabilising the Mughal empire. Jones allayed his qualms about ...”

“... he does not call these pieces poems.’ From the heart of the London literary establishment Sir John Squire described The Waste Land as a poem for which ‘a grunt would serve equally well.’ Eliot’s 1925 collection, which included ‘Gerontion’, seemed to Squire ‘obscure so inconsequent . . . Why on earth he bothers to write at all is difficult to ...”

“... the period. He reads, for instance, the story of Pocahontas, the daughter of Powhatan who married John Rolfe and moved to London, not as a story of an Indian who sought to become an Englishwoman but as a complicated narrative of negotiation. He portrays Kateri Tekakwitha – the so-called Lily of the Mohawks, now a candidate for canonisation by the Catholic ...”

“... and extensively promoted by physicians, apothecaries and barber-surgeons throughout the Christian West. Imported from the Middle East, the drug originally consisted of a mixture of pitch and asphalt, materials traditionally used in the mummification of dead bodies, but by the 12th century mumia had come to refer to the processed remains of Egyptian ...”

“... it so good, because they amount to a profound analysis of what is fundamentally wrong with the Christian God.’ Empson (like Eliot, like Larkin) fashioned for himself a buffer persona, and equipped it with a repertoire of archaic slang. On one occasion, he intervened in a ‘small controversy’ about the wit of Marvell’s ‘Garden’ to suggest why the ...”

“... There is no single recorded instance of any public official, national or local, refusing a John Poulson bribe. And a lot of the time, Reggie Maudling was Home Secretary. Not that we should fall into the trap of criminal rationaliation: even if law and order and public morality are a sham, the illusion is necessary to keep miners down the mine. Biggs ...”

“... liberation. Despite this, Garvey was taken up by the religion as a divinely inspired prophet, the John the Baptist of Rastafari. By 1940, he too was in England. Haile Selassie declined an invitation to meet him. Garvey died that year, a fact that many of his unwanted followers refused to believe, and since Haile Selassie’s reported demise in 1975 his own ...”

“... Orchid the ‘I’ character is sent to a mildly dotty but unoppressive prep school, dedicated to Christian Science and tolerant of his feebleness at scouting and cricket. In The Goose Cathedral, by contrast, the prep school he is sent to is a hell on earth. As well as contradictions there are gaps and false trails. He is fond of discovering patterns in his ...”

“... than is the wealthy Jeremiah French, just as he is more like a clergyman (and a primitive Christian) than the boisterous Mr Porter. Turner’s tart reactions to his betters are rather like those of an NCO observing the officer class; suppressed rancour jaundices his descriptions of social life in East Hoathly. His excellence as an observer derives ...”

“... especially in German-speaking Europe, which owed their existence to a widespread interest in non-Christian forms of transcendence. Free association applied to political groups before it applied to words: an interest in esoteric mysteries appeared to many to be a perfectly fine reason to get together. The specific theology of these groups varied, but certain ...”

“... pair doomed to love’s inevitable ending are compared to poets, and poets to Jews. In this most Christian world Poets are Yids. The collection in which these appeared was significantly titled After Russia. It was followed by two verse plays, Ariadne and Phaedra, in which Tsvetaeva set out her characteristic views on love and its superior passions when ...”