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“... St Francis, 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 ...”

“... which was to serve as a talisman for so many French soldiers in Flanders. The anthropologist William Christian discovered the discarded negatives of a man who had worked at the Basque shrine of Ezquioga in the Thirties. Comparing them to the photographs which were chosen as official souvenirs, he found that the images only passed where the ...”

“... journalist, because I had only just got married, and I didn’t want to be parted from my husband, William Shawcross, who had been assigned to cover the war for the Sunday Times. In our room upstairs at the Hotel Royale, Saigon, I began looking at the New Testament, and was startled to find so few passages about the Mother of God. It seems naive of me – and ...”

“... small, and if she let a boy hold her hand word would always get back to her mother Nancy, a strict Christian widow. But across the river was Ironton, Ohio, and there she could dance at a club called Ritzy Ray’s. That might have been the place she met Colonel Scott, a small-time local con artist who made his dimes collecting tolls from drivers crossing a free ...”

“... on Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra merited attention. There is at least one known case. In 2013 William Vollmann wrote about getting hold of his own FBI file and discovering that during the 1990s, following an anonymous tip, he was suspected of being the Unabomber. ‘UNABOMBER, not unlike VOLLMANN, has pride of authorship and insists his book be published ...”

“... used to stay in North End Road, Fulham with his aunt and uncle, the Burne-Joneses. One evening William Morris came into the nursery and, finding the children under the table and nobody else about, climbed on to the rocking-horse and slowly surging back and forth while the poor beast creaked, he told us a tale full of fascinating horrors, about a man who ...”

“... would be to overstate the case, Jones is allowing himself to sound less like James Joyce than William Joyce. In ‘Little Gidding’, ‘We only live, only suspire/Consumed by either fire or fire.’ On 11 September 1940, Churchill spoke of a ‘fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestige of Nazi tyranny has been burnt ...”

“... as the trial got under way at the Old Bailey in May 1918, Billing attracted the support of the Christian Scientists, who believed him to be ‘the Saviour, Christ the King, come to redeem them in this moment of national peril’. Concerned that he would not be able to continue his work if imprisoned, ‘a senior lady in the movement’ was sent to bear his ...”

“... William Empson maintained that there was a right and a wrong moment to bring theory into the business of intelligent reading, and that the professionals chose the wrong one, but he could not do without theory altogether. His book The Structure of Complex Words (1951) contains quite a lot of it; so it is not surprising that a generation of literary theorists, not wishing to remain totally out of touch with the best critic of his time, has decided to appropriate Complex Words, a work hitherto much less influential than the very early (and prodigious) Seven Types of Ambiguity ...”

“... his history of English anti-semitism, gathered both from England and from the wider background of Christian culture in Europe, to which he adds streams of secularism and Islam when his story approaches modern times. The maelstrom of original material is impressive, but it is housed in a very frustrating book – or rather two books within a single cover. One ...”

“... but the ascetic prince ‘Sagamoni Burcan’ (Shakayamuni Buddha) – revered at the time as a Christian saint. As for the khan’s summer capital in China, Shangdu, English readers will know it by a slightly different name: ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan …’ Coleridge said his opium dream had been inspired by a travel book of 1613, Purchas His ...”

“... notoriety. In 1778 the widowed 47-year-old married Graham’s 21-year-old younger brother, William – a purported letter of Macaulay’s to an outraged Wilson, reported at second-hand by Scott, claimed she ‘had been for some years struggling with nature’ and now found it necessary to comply ‘with her constitution’s earnest call’. Scott, who ...”

“... hunt reflects the clerical grief and disapproval that would lead to the founding of the Christian orders of knights, the Templars and the Hospitallers, in an effort to discipline the Crusades and their Christian militia. ‘We cannot define any better the ideological function that the Church assigned to ...”

“... her representatives casting the queen as ‘the most invincible and most mighty defender of the Christian faith against all kind of idolatries’, and constantly emphasised the iconomania of their Spanish rivals. Not everyone was convinced by these analogies between faiths: one observer of the Moroccan diplomatic delegation that visited London in 1600 wrote ...”

“... sister, Mary, served as a missionary in South Africa; and his brother Tom, a fervent admirer of William Morris, joined the Christian Social Union and volunteered in a boys’ home in Hoxton founded by F.D. Maurice, the pioneering Christian socialist. A high-minded Christianity governed ...”