Darcy

“In Antwerp they slide the printed sheets of the gospels between the folds of bales of cloth, where they hide, white against white. Warm, nestled, God whispers within each bundle; His word sails the sea, is unloaded in eastern ports, travels to London in a cart.”
― Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light

“Was Anaxagoras an atheist? There is nothing anachronistic about this question. In the late 430s, he was put on trial for “impiety,” on the grounds that he denied the divinity of the heavenly bodies (which he undoubtedly did). This may have been the first time in history that an individual was prosecuted for heretical religious beliefs.”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

“Margaret Atwood started writing The Handmaid’s Tale in West Berlin in the spring of 1984. Like Orwell when he began Nineteen Eighty-Four, she was in her early forties and she knew exactly what she wanted to say. The novel originated with a file of newspaper cuttings she had begun collecting while living in England, covering such topics as the religious right, prisons in Iran, falling birth rates, Nazi sexual politics, polygamy and credit cards. She let these diverse observations ferment, like compost, until a story grew out of them. Her travels in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, where she experienced “the wariness, the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information,” nourished the novel, too, as did her adolescent obsession with dystopias and World War Two.”
― Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984

“It was not just Critias, the author of the Sisyphus fragment, who reacted to the atheist revolution. Already, in the 420s, in the glow of the sophistic movement, tragedies and comedies began to explore the question of whether gods exist. The ideas canvassed by Protagoras, Democritus, and Prodicus reached a broad audience thanks to the theater.”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World