In his best-known satire of 1726, Jonathan Swift confects a historical account of the “civil commotions” which have claimed eleven thousand Lilliputian and Blefescusian lives and at the centre of which stands the deadly matter of the end, big or little, at which an egg is to be broken. The passage, which casts a withering gaze over English religious history from the time of Henry VIII forward, merits a generous citation:

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