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“... as I explained to the late Princess Margaret on one of her visits to the Gallery, stands for the Christian soul. ‘How very, very Spanish,’ she pronounced slowly, after a moment or two pursing her lips. The Antiquary was published in 1816, not long after the Allies had insisted that the French return to Spain the paintings they had confiscated for the ...”

“... to foist their belief systems on the Indians. As Porter points out, the East India Company banned Christian missionaries from operating in the subcontinent. All the same, millions of Indians continued to believe that Christianisation and the destruction of their caste were part of the long-term plan. That fatal misunderstanding was among the underlying causes ...”

“... the beautiful youth whom Apollo loved – his death and metamorphosis into a flower became a ‘Christian symbol of rebirth’. Other categories include ‘Weddings’, ‘Dogs and Cats and Mice’ and later, ‘Dogs and Cats and a Trout’ (called Antonella).The tales take the form of ‘Brief Lives’, giving glimpses of heroic suffering and describing ...”

“... sense to speak of salvation or redemption. Surely the idea of personal salvation is specifically Christian, and also in any case childish? No to both questions. Johnston has a particular interest in Christianity, and regularly uses its distinctive idioms, but any religion that offers different final outcomes for the good and the bad operates with a notion of ...”

“... Jake La Motta’s cruel and frightening disfigurement of his young opponent Janiro in the boxing-ring may go over the heads of many spectators, for whom the film may only be a gorier but fussier Rocky. Jake’s wife has mentioned in the most offhand manner, in an innocent context, that Janiro is ‘good-looking’; Jake, like an inarticulate Othello, has ...”

“... Six, seven, eight times it rang. No answer. He shifted the handset to his chest, letting it ring and ring. The blurb on the back of Gerard Woodward’s second collection, After the Deafening, suggests that we see him as a poetic Kurt Vonnegut who is writing ‘the science fiction of everyday life’. This analogy is ...”

“... damsels in the haunted thickets of Burne-Jones and the sinister bestiaries of Wagner’s Ring, deepen the oneiric mood.One of the best accounts we have of the malevolent power of Lang’s volumes is A.S. Byatt’s novel The Children’s Book, in which Olive Wellwood pays her rackety family’s bills by publishing stories whose ever more tangled and ...”

“... ideas of incarnation – often sacrificial – in a strongly flavoured mixture of pagan-Judaeo-Christian-Freudian symbols. By contrast, the Jungian ambience of Meret Oppenheim’s native Zurich provided the impulse for her works expressing her lot as a woman: such marvellous, mischievous pieces as the famous fur cup and saucer (Petit déjeuner en ...”

“... run is louder than bombs, even if, as often happened in my day at the London Review, people would ring up to cancel their subscriptions when they violently disagreed. It was mostly after we’d run a piece by Edward Said. ‘I refuse to read pieces written by murderers,’ one of them said. ‘And we’re happy not to publish them,’ I said. ‘Said is happy ...”

“... When in the peroration to his ‘I have a dream’ address in 1963, King called for freedom to ring out even from Georgia’s Stone Mountain (the founding site of the second Ku Klux Klan – the national Klan of the 1920s), he did not expect that thirty years later the Congressman from Stone Mountain, Newt Gingrich, would promulgate his ‘contract with ...”

“... its unprovocative title, its brass-rubbings and its frequent dippings into the nitty-gritty of Christian rites, Alan Bray’s last book, The Friend, might not seem terribly exciting at first glance. And yet it is written in part as a defence of John Boswell’s Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, which came out a decade ago, and in ...”

“... in middle age narrated by a pagan who naturally lacks the conceptual equipment to understand the Christian significance of what he has come across. Put like that, the poem threatens to be very tiresome, a tolerant laugh at the benighted; but the tone is brilliantly well handled, and one thing that emerges from the puzzlings of this good and intelligent man ...”

“... warned, only half-jokingly, that were Sharon awarded the other position his first move would be to ring the government buildings with tanks. Control of the Army was withheld from Sharon the professional soldier, while his political ambitions were rewarded. Despite the inevitable pre-eminence of the Army in Israeli life, it has no militarist tradition and no ...”

“... example of the progressive intensification of a rumour. When the priests of the city refused to ring the bells in celebration of the German victory they were, in the earliest version of the rumour, deprived of their parishes; in a later version they were shot; and in a still later version they were hung from the bells as living clappers. The event from ...”

“... Zeus, Helen and a house called Arden, the book collapses together Shakespearean comedies of love, Christian mythologies and Greek tragedies of desire. But there is a suspicion that the grandiose mythical parallels and godly overlays to the mortal drama are just top dressing on a squalid family romance. It comes as no surprise that Helen – who is married to ...”