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“... first book in 1901 (wrong), another who thinks it was 1894 (right). Marie Corelli’s The Master Christian is oddly transformed into The Masterful Christian (a feminist-Freudian slip?). The contents of books are sometimes botched, though whether through hurry, error, or delicacy is not clear. Gertrude Atherton’s Black ...”

“... sensation I had,’ Biden wrote, ‘was best captured in a line I knew from a sonnet by John Milton: “I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.”’Biden became the tragic young man of the Senate, uncertain whether he should resign to look after his surviving children. But in his account the Senate’s old guard welcomed him and gave ...”

“... Drinking is part of the equation. I don’t mean to make it sound as if Antrim has become John O’Hara with a cell phone. No, a disciple of Barthelme conquers the territory of Cheever and Updike – it’s stunning. ‘Another Manhattan’, from 2008, the longest and most wrenching of these pieces, begins as if it’s going to be a simple farce or ...”

“... about physics and a private detective with an eccentric JFK assassination conspiracy theory. John Sheddan, a lowlife of Bobby’s long acquaintance who forges prescriptions and deals drugs, puts it to Bobby that they have something in common: I know that you think we’re very different, me and thee. My father was a country storekeeper and yours a ...”

“... John Major’s vision of Britain is history by now: a unitary state north and south of the Tweed, secured by consent, subject to one monarch and funded by a non-tartan tax system. When Major first published his views, however, in the punningly titled Historia Maioris Britanniae (1521), his innovativeness upset fellow Scots ...”

“... about his novel, Vonnegut has asked: ‘what’s so great about being smart?’ It’s an oddly Christian message that one finally gets from Galapagos. Except ye become as lobotomised sea lions, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Some chance, Vonnegut. At the heart of Galapagos is an exhausted misanthropy trying unsuccessfully to change its mind. In ...”

“... the Society’s history in more than six hundred pages, ably translated from German by John Noël Dillon. Markus Friedrich’s volume could be described as relentless, but its barrage of information is a trustworthy basis from which to begin to understand one of the most remarkable products of Counter-Reformation energy. The Jesuits have always ...”

“... the Socratic Club, here described by one frequenter as providing ‘a good-humoured and high-level Christian debate’ in a room so crowded that students sat on the floor or under the piano. At its inception Lewis agreed to be the Senior Member of the University required by the Proctors to support and oversee any society or club proposing to include ...”

“... also provoke a degree of puzzlement, as much on the right as on the left. In The Right Nation, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, two centre-right journalists who work on the Economist, ask why only 54 per cent of voters earning over $100,000 a year voted for Bush in 2000. Why does the party of big business, deregulation and tax-cutting engender less ...”

“... kind – was marked from start to finish by avoidable and ultimately tragic mistakes. The Orthodox Christian empire of Ethiopia faced many threats during its long history, but the Italians couldn’t be considered the most serious of them. The battle took place in the highlands of the northern province of Tigray and began shortly before dawn on 1 March ...”

“... Marranos, Moriscos, Mudejars, Mozarabs, Muwallads; converted Jews, converted Muslims, Muslims under Christian rule, Christians under Muslim rule, Christian converts to Islam: the early history of Spain was to a large extent shaped by the relationship between the adherents of the three monotheistic religions, and in particular by the fierce debates aroused when one group fell under the dominion of another, and members of one or other faith converted to that of their rulers ...”

“... century, it is likely that the incidence of literacy was far more widespread in Islamic than in Christian territory, and the standard of medical treatment far higher. In the circumstances, the history of the Crusades makes enlightening reading for the Westerner. (For the Israelis, who have already produced several major Crusade scholars, it is of course of ...”

“... must be rejected again and again. George Herbert’s poems vividly describe the inner weather of Christian devotion. It’s all there: self-abasement before God; horror at his absence; meditation on the boundless enormity of sin; meditation on the boundless generosity of Christ’s sacrifice; outpourings of gratitude and love; self-excoriation for ...”

“... Pater and the statistician Karl Pearson, the political economist Harriet Martineau and Dickens’s John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend – all these Victorians, real and imaginary, deliberately extinguish some aspect of their personality in order to find out a hidden (and often unpleasant) truth. Levine calls these willed acts of self-suppression ‘something ...”

“... mostly Scottish, and Hughes partly Welsh. The presidential or father figure of the group would be John Buchan, another Scot, whose innings was over before the younger ones started to play, although he was still around as they became famous. This English angle was partly suggested to me at the time when Hughes’s penultimate novel, intended as the first of a ...”