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“... Sexual Dissidence, have caused scarcely a ripple outside the literary critical lagoon, but when John Boswell, a rather old-fashioned medieval historian, claimed to have discovered evidence for gay marriages being celebrated and blessed inside Christian churches, he made waves. It is not altogether obvious why the ...”

“... Spirits’. Empson’s fullest exploration of this subject remained unfinished. The editor, John Haffenden, has stitched together the various drafts that he left behind and has given the somewhat unwieldy result the title ‘The Spirits of the Dream’. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck meets a fairy in the Athenian wood and asks her where she is ...”

“... and Nationalism, which betrays not only a thorough knowledge of the highways and byways of Christian theology but a positive fascination with it. Over and over again he returns to the fact that the religious impulse will out, regaling us with stories of the good Communists of the Lake Baikal region who worship the lake’s otters on the understanding ...”

“... Are you a Christian? Do you believe? Do you believe that Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem, thanks to a Roman census, on a day corresponding to 25 December, at the end of a year corresponding to 1 BC, that all those fireworks, a few weeks ago, were marking his 2000th birthday in a meaningful way, that his mother was a virgin, that he rode into Jerusalem on an ass? Well, I am afraid all of that is almost certainly not true ...”

“... Humiliation if they confessed they had not read Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. As his translator John Hoole put it in 1763, ‘Of all Authors, so familiarly known by name to the generality of English readers as Tasso, perhaps there is none whose works have been so little read.’ Hoole did much to change that: his translation – staid, Drydenical, but ...”

“... and indeed ridiculed for this hatred, which was directed mostly against Christianity and ‘neo-Christian’ literary critics, but these are things one is unlikely to be casual about if they matter to one at all. He believed that the Christian God, referred to in the letters and in many of his other critical writings as ...”

“... directionless European like Logan. They conversed. The Indian, whose name was George and who was a Christian, immediately desired to help Logan in his search for the Bengali primer. The Englishman did not particularly desire any company, but on the other hand he hadn’t the heart to refuse such an unselfish offer. Yet – he was still ravenously ...”

“... after Constantine to reject Christianity. Like all members of the imperial family, he was raised a Christian. Following Constantine’s death in May 337, the six-year-old Julian was overlooked in the dynastic butchery that eliminated his father and other blood rivals of Constantine’s son and successor, Constantius II. Excluded from his cousin’s ...”

“... an autobiographical fragment from Prospero which explained why he had adopted the not yet invented Christian system of dating. He was, after all, a prophet. More digging produced more scarith and more of Prospero’s memoirs; it also produced a little tin goddess in a skirt, and what seemed to be a lamp. By 1636, when the number of scarith discovered had ...”

“... someone with a gun or a bomb but also someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian civilisation.’ The dictatorial regimes led successively by Generals Videla, Roberto Eduardo Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri from 1976 to 1982 interpreted the concept of ‘Western and Christian civilisation’ in their ...”

“... Ethiopia was by the Middle Ages the only Christian country outside Europe and thus of great interest to medieval Christendom. Since the early 12th century, the Ethiopians had been in possession of a chapel in Jerusalem and a station in the Grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Both were visited every year or so by Ethiopian pilgrims, whose coming, and obvious devotion, gave rise to the idea in Europe that they might serve as useful allies in the Crusades ...”

“... Tall, silver-haired and bearded, with a mesmerising voice and beguiling manner of delivery, John Pocock has long struck me as the Gandalf of the historical profession. The range, altitude and stylistic sophistication of his writing seem almost other-worldly, though legend has it that his distinctive accent derives from a small community of Channel Islanders in New Zealand ...”

“... contest between Cruz, the Tea Party evangelical, and Marco Rubio, the neoconservative protégé of John McCain. The inevitability of Rubio’s nomination had now been accepted as an article of faith by the pundits. Here was a young, slick, good-looking reactionary whose parents had fled Cuba. The themes of anti-communism, which somehow continue to animate US ...”

“... and so on. Stereotyping is particularly evident in the case of religious apparitions. William Christian, an anthropologist turned historian, has been studying apparitions in Late Medieval Spain. St Ildefonso, St Anthony of Padua and St Michael the Archangel all made their appearance, but the dominant figure was that of the Virgin Mary. At Jaen in ...”

“... often waned as Comte’s doctrines were more fully understood (most famously in the case of John Stuart Mill, whose early admiration for Comte’s phenomenalism and rationality gradually gave way to revulsion at his dogmatism, religiosity, ‘moralism’ and hostility to personal liberty). Nevertheless, prominent 19th-century figures who acknowledged a ...”