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“... Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.’ The weighty agonies and agonisings of Flaubert, most famously over the details of Madame Bovary, have made him an exemplary writer for other self-conscious writers, and this unlikely simile is quoted in a recent work testifying to that detailed interest: Julian Barnes in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) made a clever novel out of a preoccupation with the minutiae of Flaubert’s life, inventing a biographer-narrator to fight a long rearguard action against the death of the author ...”

“... thought on minute particulars, and even if this is less clear than it might be from the plates in Ronald Lightbown’s massive monograph, Lightbown himself has a very keen eye for the subordinate, often tiny things which the artist painted so well, and has industriously inquired into what exactly they were, and also into what they meant. There is, for ...”

“... than that. Not once in the course of these five volumes does he so much as mention the name of Christ, and it is clear that his calling induces anxiety and inhibition the moment it threatens to burst from its professional bands. His great virtue is that he rarely moralises. When so many country clergy were not so much Christians as state-licensed ...”

“... 19th-century Indian Civil Service. So a governess, a top-notch preparatory school, Winchester and Christ Church were as much a matter of course for Cecil as Gladstone Elementary School in Cardiff was for Hugh. They did, however, share an adolescent ambition to work in newspapers, though for entirely different reasons. King, a nephew of Alfred Harmsworth (Lord ...”

“... son appears to have inherited. As with many pious Poles of the time, it was the Virgin Mary, not Christ, who was the chief object of the young Wojtyla’s devotion. Indeed, Christ himself seems strangely marginal in his early spiritual life, shouldered aside by a strong-minded mother. At one point he considered scaling ...”

“... an author of the time relates,’ worshipped at a domestic chapel in which stood images of Christ and Abraham, along with a pair of pagan sages or saints. The beliefs of the Syrian prince do not fail to seduce adepts of religious syncretism. Again, the Emperor Tacitus, on generous exposition as an elderly senator of frugal and scholarly habits (each ...”

“... majority of the members of the Church, is still not converted, because they do not believe Jesus Christ when he says: ‘Woe unto you when all men speak well of you!’ It is hard to know which is the most self-deceptive implication here: that the poet’s ‘honesty’ is free from worldly estimation, that he has come to terms with his own unimportance, or ...”

“... book. What did Griffith bring into the world? Imagine an unholy combination of The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11, a movie as violent and sentimental as Saving Private Ryan and as tricksy as Forrest Gump, landing with the force of Titanic in the nickelodeon universe of 1915, where the typical attraction was 20 minutes long. Griffith’s ...”

“... Church took over all the major pagan feast days,’ and that ‘the choice of a date to mark Christ’s birthday at Christmas ... was influenced by the ancient Roman celebration of the birth of the sun on December 21.’ Now, if those witches read The Stations of the Sun, they will learn that Christmas was not, in fact, derived from, superimposed on or ...”

“... where are the Beatles, who, as John Lennon justly pointed out, became more famous than Jesus Christ? In fact, few entertainers qualify, though there are four sporting figures: the cricketers Bradman and Grace, the footballer Pelé and the baseball player Babe Ruth. In addition, Sir Roy Welensky was ‘the only Commonwealth Prime Minister to have been, in ...”

“... Antarctica, by firing off a hundred thousand cannons in Nebraska. Other Eyes than Mine (1926) by Ronald Arbuthnott    Two Latin scholars, an Englishman and a German, bitter rivals, simultaneously publish biographies of the poet Persius that completely contradict each other. An Italian scholar publishes an article definitively proving that the Englishman ...”

“... the religious right could rally behind a candidate who said, with apparent sincerity, that Jesus Christ had ‘changed my heart’. This time, the leading Republican candidates sound unconvincing when they court Christian conservatives – if they try to court them at all. This gloomy picture of political decline will come as a surprise to those who have ...”

“... and inscribed with the date 1456, which is one of the first portrait busts made since antiquity. Ronald Lightbown, in the course of trying to discover more about the sitter for the catalogue of the museum’s collection which he was working on with Pope-Hennessy, discovered a manuscript autobiography by Chellini which revealed that he had been a friend and ...”

“... investigated fictional character of his age. What was practised as a diversion by Andrew Lang and Ronald Knox has turned into a full-scale critical apparatus. It’s a mock apparatus, and not really engaged with criticism; and yet not just a joke, since it does elucidate something – those aspects of another way of life that for us have now become ...”

“... Joseph Torra’s latest novel, The Bystander’s Scrapbook, opens in 1984, the year Ronald Reagan was re-elected President. In Somerville, Massachusetts, as in the rest of the country, corporate growth and gentrification are changing the face of neighbourhoods that once boasted a mix of ethnic traditions: a tenement that housed Hispanic families is overhauled and made into condos for white yuppies; colourful dives, the Italian cobbler’s shop and the Greek breakfast joint are torn down to make room for a new mall ...”