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“... Ian Rankin’s novel Knots & Crosses introduced us to a tough Edinburgh Detective Sergeant called John Rebus. A series of local girls had been kidnapped and strangled. Rebus – 41-year-old drinker, ex-soldier, failed husband, absentee father, Christian, annual rereader of Crime and Punishment – begins receiving a series ...”

“... John Smith was ‘one of them’. Tony Blair is ‘one of them’. And so are Chris Smith and Jack Straw and half the Shadow Cabinet and many more on the backbenches including Frank Field, that one-man think-tank of the Labour Right. ‘They’ are the Christian socialists, architects of New Labour, ready to provide the movement with the ethical foundations which seem sorely missing ...”

“... Paul is an icon of early Christianity, and of Western culture. His central significance for later Christian theology means that any interpretation of his thought is necessarily grounded in personal belief, or prejudice. Objectivity is neither achievable, nor perhaps desirable. And this problem is compounded for those who wish to write about his life and ...”

“... is being sacrificed, the dragon with its throat transpierced, a sign left over from the damp, pre-Christian world, led from the cave on its chain (the woman holds it lightly in her hand) to be destroyed for no good reason, given that it’s tame and captive now. Perhaps it’s just too green or too expressive, set against this knight whose mind is ...”

“... of this insight entails, above all, some attention to the conventions with which Hebrew and early Christian literature operated: not ignoring the religious subject-matter, but grasping the fact that like any other subject-matter it could be conveyed only through the medium of a specific literary culture. The outstanding essays here are those which most ...”

“... of God, the Kingdom of the Last Days. According to this millenial view, the prospect of the Christian message finally being heard in every part of the world brings mankind near to the end of time, a moment predicted in the Book of Revelation. It comes when the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19 to the Apostles is fulfilled, when disciples have been made ...”

“... assembly line, for example – were fictions. While Daisey is being reprimanded, a writer called John D’Agata has been promoting a book, Lifespan of a Fact (Norton, $17.95), about the way he changes or makes up the facts. D’Agata and David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010), are the leaders of a movement that believes the most ...”

“... than of the recognition the world awarded. He now appears as a liberal bigot whom no socialist, Christian or conservative could consider non-partisan. Mrs Moorman’s book concentrates on the period before his return to Cambridge as Regius Professor (a Baldwin appointment) in 1927. Only two of her ten chapters concern his life after 1927, whether from ...”

“... Edgar Hoover, Castro, Khrushchev, Howard Hunt, Earl Warren, George H.W. Bush, Duong Van Minh, the John Birch Society, the Freemasons or Aristotle Onassis. ‘I am not a conspiracy theorist,’ he begins. ‘I am a conspiracy empiricist.’ He wants to know the truth because without it ‘another president could once more be cut down in his or her ...”

“... the campaign and have now come in from the cold. These include Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, John Bolton and Sarah Palin. All of them are touted as potential cabinet appointees but all of them have enemies among the Republicans in the Senate who could block their bids for office and return them to permanent vacation as back-up commentators on Fox ...”

“... in Hollywood; H.L. Mencken, who came under suspicion for his German background during both wars; John O’Hara, whose many failures included a job application to the fledgling CIA). The book’s editors, JPat Brown, B.C.D. Lipton and Michael Morisy, founded and run the website MuckRock, where anyone can file a Freedom of Information Act request with the US ...”

“... burned) in October 1536. Daniell, like his hero, is an altar-stripper: he writes ‘Paul’ and ‘John’ for ‘St Paul’ and ‘St John’ as others write ‘Austen’ for ‘Jane Austen’. (For some reason Tyndale himself kept the ‘St’ for Matthew, but dropped it for everybody else.) He is that rare thing, not just ...”

“... Hone had also just written and published three parodies of the Book of Common Prayer: The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial Member, The Political Litany and The Sinecurists’ Creed, which satirised the venality of Tory MPs willing to say, vote for and even believe whatever their ministers told them to in exchange for the sinecures and ...”

“... lower-cultured citizens the Balts always thought they were; the Central Asians see them as Christian oppressors. Christian Armenians prosecute a war in the Caucasus which they define almost as holy: as the struggle of a (naturally superior) Christian culture against a Moslem ...”

“... arranged for Jill Biden to pay a visit to a Coke job-training programme in Brazil, joined Joe and John Kerry for the unveiling of the Coke-sponsored 2014 World Cup trophy, and tagged along with Jill as part of a government delegation to Cuba, which happens to be one of only two countries in the world where Coke can’t be bought or sold (the other is North ...”