Richard Bartholomew

The wholesale removal or blunting of ITV’s once powerful quartet of factual programmes… meant there was already little counter to the breathless, drive-by journalism of the Crime Reporters Association… [Sir Paul] Condon offered access to the CIB casebook in return for the media’s support for his war on corruption. In the emerging low-risk, dumbed-down news age such handouts not only help assuage in-house libel lawyers but could also be repackaged with two narcissistic ingredients – a public interest claim and the pretence of independent investigation. What’s in it for the police? They get to control the media access while looking serious about clearing out their stables. Subliminally or explicitly, the argument for self-regulation is also reinforced.

When the moderns, drawing the blackest curtain of obscurantism that ever obscured history, decided that nothing mattered much before the Renaissance and the Reformation, they instantly began their modern career by falling into a big blunder… They assumed that Aristotle was some crabbed antiquity and tyranny from the black back of the Dark Ages, and that Plato was an entirely new Pagan pleasure never yet tasted by Christian men. Father Knox has shown in what a startling state of innocence is the mind of Mr. H. L. Mencken, for instance, upon this point. In fact, of course, the story is exactly the other way round. If anything, it was Platonism that was the old orthodoxy. It was Aristotelianism that was the very modern revolution. And the leader of that modern revolution was the man who is the subject of this book.

The caution which the scriptural passages cited above [Deut 18:9 and Isa 8.19] present against seeking ultimate truth through mediums is, therefore, an important one, I feel. It is for that reason I could never make an -ism of all this... I could never put at the center of my belief and life communication with any finite being.

It has often been stated that the Druse religion is a queer relic of the grossest form of paganism mixed with Christianity and further confused by misunderstood Greek philosophy… I once talked to an ex-member of the French Foreign Legion who swore that he had seen representations of the Golden Calf in a Druse mosque. The central fact of their faith, however, is the belief that the lunatic El-Hakem bi-amr-Illah, Fatimate Caliph of Egypt, was an incarnation of the Deity.

One has the feeling in Palestine that the civilisation that crashed into ruin was very like our own. One has more in common with the fallen pillars of Jerash than with the finest Moslem mosque. Our world, imperfect as it is, is still a Christian world and has its roots in Christianity. Everything that is against Christianity, no matter how trivial it may appear, is a spy from the forces of savagery which have always waited ready with drawn knives to dance among the ruins.

remembered Strabo’s comment on the influence of the Alexandrian Jews in his time: "These Jews," said Strabo, "have penetrated in every country, and it would be hard to find anywhere in the whole world a single place that has not had to put up with this race, and in which it did not obtain the mastery."

"Though they are black," she told a boy in the Highlands, "they are just as bonnie and nice as if they were white. Indeed the colour does not matter. We are all the same inside our heads and hearts, and the little lads who know about Jesus are trying as hard to be good and brave Christians as you boys who are white.”

She became what Dr. Livingstone had been… [S]he acted as a Consul, started a native court, and, like Deborah of old, judged the people and guided them about the new laws that were put into force. It was the first time in the history of our Empire that a woman had done such things.

to obtain Gassendi's Philosophie d'Epicure, and Bodin's Heptaplomères – reputed to extol Judaism at the expense of Christianity. In 1653 Christina's agents were still trying to obtain a copy of Garasse's La Doctrine Curieuse – a treatise that appeared to attack atheism but really defended it. The most prolonged pursuit of all was undertaken to unearth a copy of that infamous book The Three Imposters.