A European observer would probably be struck by the unpeopled landscape and the alligators, the intense local and voluntary involvement (a congregation, a united small community), but also by the defiant individualism—the solitary seeker rigged up as if for nineteenth-century missionary work—and, of course, the slightly insane theological certainties.

The book may only recapitulate much of what’s been said and screamed over the Western intelligentsia’s embrace of the charismatic Islamist Tariq Ramadan and and its wincing alienation of the atheist feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but if that’s all it does, it’ll be enough.

…in the last years of the nineteenth century, a number of dissident priests and some misled laity, calling themselves modernists, tried to force the Church to abandon some of its principles: to concede the primacy of science over faith…

In an attempt to cleanse its book reviews of commercial and political overtones, The Fortnightly Review transformed critical writing by implementing an editorial policy of signature.

By JULIAN BARNES [The Times Literary Supplement] – In 1937, the American art critic Walter Pach edited and translated the first English-language version of Eugène Delacroix’s Journal. In his introduction he recorded a story told him decades previously by Odilon Redon. In 1861, the young Redon, yet to make his name, had gone to a […]

By PAUL LINFORD – ‘Messrs Harman, Mandelson, Johnson and Co have talked all night in language that suggested an attempt would be made to form some sort of Lib-Lab pact, but given how the two parties have performed I think it would be pretty politically unsustainable. ‘Although it is still possible the Tories may win […]

By VERNON BOGDANOR [New Statesman] – A hundred years ago, we seemed about to witness the strange death, not of Liberal England, as George Dangerfield suggested in his book, but of Conservative England. The hold of the Liberals on government, buttressed as it was by the Irish nationalists and the infant Labour Party, seemed unshakeable. […]