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“... west, leaves us frustrated. The marzipan-and-betel-juice grandeur of St Pancras is impenetrable, ring-fenced, security-guarded. You can visit the old station on Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m. and 1.30 p.m. And of course I do. In recent times, the vast corridors, decaying public rooms and dramatic staircase have been a favoured set for fashion shoots and ...”

“... own feeling for the paradoxical, the metaphysical; but there is something in it that has the ring of truth as well as of wit. All Dryden’s portraits except that by Kneller (which shows a fine fastidious face that doesn’t want to be painted) are of singing owls, hogs that fiddle. Interestingly, Dryden himself made rather the same point in a late ...”

“... when it is invaded by militias with big crosses on their tabards and turned over to become a Christian concentration camp. ‘I wanted to … lie down on the floor in a tight knot around my uselessness and my aching breasts and scream.’It won’t spoil the books too much to know that Lauren – going now by her Yoruba surname, Olamina ...”

“... as Lewis puts it, in the footsteps of Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler: the home, the wedding ring, even the binary sexuation, are only there by convention, honoured – or not – by time. ‘Natural’ childbirth, with pools and music and aromatic midwives, is ‘a regimen full of carefully stylised gestational labour hacks and artifices’, Lewis ...”

“... solos. The record producer opted for the first take – lyrics and laughs make cash registers ring, which sounds like a business motto. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, a pop music machine cranks out rhymed songs non-stop – ‘for me’, Waller might well have moaned.The demand for fresh material for Waller was largely filled by ‘novelty songs’, as this ...”

“... name for Stephen Wonham was Siegfried – Forster came in time to regard the leitmotifs of The Ring as a bit blatant, incessantly directing one’s attention to ring, sword, Valhalla. He admitted to his interviewers that he had learned from the Wagnerian leitmotifs, but his own ‘rhythms’ are less obtrusive. You are ...”

“... In this century, witches have become feminist and New Age icons, revered as victims of a Christian patriarchy’s persecution and misrepresentation. ‘Wiccan’ cults of nature-worship have sprung up, as have a small number of Satanist cults. Now the belief in the satanic sabbat seems to have returned. Belief in ‘ritual’ abuse and satanic ritual ...”

“... It is bound up with the claim to individual autonomy and impatience with the given order. The Christian notion of sin gets us close to it, as does the Greek hubris. The judges with their classical education are better equipped than the analyst to understand this: the word ‘tragedy’ comes twice to Picasso’s lips. ‘Drama’, likewise, is a term that ...”

“... chiefly survives today: the last archbishop of Canterbury but two, George Carey, wrote a book on Christian unity called The Meeting of the Waters. The literal meeting he had in mind, he explains, was of the Greta and Tees, with which he became familiar when was a vicar in Durham. The song was adopted by the temperance movement along with other ‘aqueous ...”

“... is blasphemy? ‘I want the pope’s blessing,’ Andres Serrano said in an interview. ‘I am a Christian.’ If you give Serrano’s Immersion (Piss Christ) to students without telling them what it is, Hope told us that night, twirling her pasta, they will talk about the colour. Grading red from the edges to the centre, where the face drooping forward from ...”

“... habit her family referred to as ‘elfing it’. When she was sent to deliver a letter, she would ring the doorbell and leg it; she greeted family guests with what she called ‘sorry grace’ and played the piano grudgingly – and only if visitors remained in an adjoining room. She avoided chores like the plague – ‘God keep me from what they call ...”

“... counsels of princely crime, but in his equable observation of contrasting civic and Christian virtues. The only evidence for this claim, abundantly disproved by centuries of polemic, is the autobiographical illumination Berlin reports in these pages – the intellectual discovery he himself made on reading Machiavelli. In such ...”

“... blown up and sank with half their crews. Dunn told his interviewer many years later: ‘If they ring down Full Speed, like they did a couple of times, and you’re supposed to be on the verge of meeting the enemy, believe me it’s a frightening experience . . . you’re waiting to be blowed sky-high at any minute.’ Interviewer: And all the time you were ...”

“... to cast a gentler gaze on the world, but the gaze is still filled with depth and wonder. The Christian God, apparent in Housekeeping, also lives in the body of these three novels, but Robinson has come up with the inspired idea of allowing the souls of the novels, so to speak, to be fully human. Gilead, Home and Lila dramatise the lives of a small number ...”

“... be found wicked – then from that much farther back again through the rule of Islam to the early Christian centuries within a deliquescent Roman culture, with Augustine’s war on the world’s virtues as merely ‘splendid vices’; and from that back again to Greek and, above all, Judaic idealism, an austere and fierce feeling for absolutes. It’s not my ...”