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“... 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 ...”

“... public schools and Oxbridge; patronised the arts and the London Season; and propounded traditional Christian values in highbrow journalism and popular fiction – even when they were racked by religious doubt. The ruling class ruled because it was clever, because it was well off, and because it hung together. It wore the old school tie, congregated in the Home ...”

“... Life of Huldrych Zwingli with a couplet: ‘Some talk of Martin Luther and some of Calvin (John)/But Zwingli’s hardly mentioned this side of Zollikon.’ Nevertheless, one can’t deny the truth of it. Potter’s admirable book piled up the evidence that would allow English-speakers to reassess Switzerland’s pioneer Reformer, but, nearly half a ...”

“... great traditions of philosophy ... Sometimes he would wander into irrelevant invectives against John Stuart Mill, who in a footnote had once referred to Bowen ... as ‘an obscure American’. It was Bowen who twenty years earlier had within two years of Mill’s publishing the Examination instituted an elective course at Harvard entirely devoted to it. In ...”

“... the ‘primal curse’, inflicted on humankind as a punishment for the Fall. Both classical and Christian orthodoxies informed early modern attitudes, so that the devoutly Protestant John Locke could assert on both counts that ‘labour for labour’s sake is against nature.’ There would be no work in heaven. But then ...”

“... In 1830 the prophet John Wroe asked his congregation of Christian Israelites in Ashton-under-Lyne for seven virgins to serve in his household. The Israelites had already built a Sanctuary and four gatehouses at Ashton, in the belief that the Lancashire cotton town was to be the site of the New Jerusalem ...”

“... sometimes baffling to the agnostic opponent, of condemning criticism he disagreed with as ‘neo-Christian’. The prefix suggests that indignant denials of Christian faith were merely evasive and would do you no good: you could be neo-Christian without being ...”

“... or Greek, written over three or four centuries by pagan members of the senatorial élite, by their Christian successors, and by representatives of all sorts of other points of view. When these monsters are tracked down to the ancient ‘sources’, it’s not surprising to find that the writers pretty well always write about other emperors, not their ...”

“... of $3 million each, the prison makes little economic sense. But Republicans in Congress led by John McCain have said they’ll oppose him and have the numbers to do so. Dick Cheney appears on television, rather than in the dock, keeping the torture ‘debate’ alive. I wouldn’t have bet that diplomatic relations with Cuba would be restored before ...”

“... all going to die anyway. This is a weirdly literal-minded reading of the line, especially for a Christian, which is what Auden was by 1944; surely it refers to death-in-life, to other ways of being dead than the mere biological one? (We must love one another, or it will be as if we never lived.) Dropping a line from your official oeuvre, however, is not the ...”

“... students with the casual self-assurance of an Ivy League professor. Outside her elegant classroom, Christian monks with Taliban-like beards swarm the streets. She has also been enlisted in other ideological battles. A Google search reveals her as an early feminist, a black martyr (she was Egyptian), and a lesbian icon (despite the fact that ancient sources ...”

“... at times as models of dedication to philosophical or political ideals, at times as examples of pre-Christian misguidedness about the meaning of death, though even Dante, so quick to condemn his fellow Florentines, saved the suicide Cato from his Inferno and made of him a judge of men. The authors of the histories, speeches and essays that featured such men ...”

“... the fact that Matthew and Mark record the last words of Jesus as spoken in Aramaic, while Luke and John offer a different version, in Greek. But although Mark, followed by Matthew, offers various sayings in Aramaic he immediately translates them into Greek. The evangelists were addressing not only Gentiles but the large number of Jews whose ordinary language ...”

“... supremely, and it cannot readily be transplanted elsewhere. In Russell’s version of liberalism, John Stuart Mill takes a central place. This may be the standard view, but it is not without its distortions. Historically, as Russell admits, liberalism came first, and Mill’s path from marginality to central cultural icon came much later. The Mill of On ...”

“... have missed, but where a highly complex topic, such as the history of the Knights Templar or of Christian origins, is got up for a specific purpose, with the research carried out, as it largely must be, at second hand, it is none too easy to get its feel and setting, and the risk of making major blunders increases with the anxiety to find quick answers to ...”