“... perfect moral commonwealth’. His definition, so far as I know, is accepted by no other scholar, though Dr Davis gives short shrift to rival definitions. But is a timeless definition possible or desirable? Dr Davis does not distinguish, for instance, between the utopias written in the vernacular during the English Revolution, many of which were ...”

“... urban history and its leading exponent. It has been rare among British historians for a single scholar both to sponsor and draw to himself a major field of study. Urban history in Britain was given its lead by the union in Dyos’s mind of history and the social sciences, applied, not to a period or a theme, but to a phenomenon – the city. It was ...”

“... time I was working, one floor below his, in collaboration with his formidable ideological critic Richard Lewontin – the second of the remarkable triumvirate who inhabit the Museum (the third, in the basement, is Stephen Jay Gould). Lewontin claims that when the conflict between them was at its most intense, Wilson wouldn’t even get into the lift between ...”

“... new arrival presented an opportunity to learn about the Greeks and their language. Eventually, as Richard Calis writes, Crusius ‘compiled the period’s richest record of Greek life under Ottoman rule’. In The Discovery of Ottoman Greece, Calis reconstructs Crusius’s efforts to learn about modern Greece from his corner of the Holy Roman Empire. What ...”

“... of history-as-thrills is not likely to find much in this book to set his spine tingling, can the scholar learn anything fresh? Given the immense literature on plague and its social impact (to which Professor Cipolla has made distinguished contributions, but on which the massive volumes of Jean Biraben might be thought to have said the last word), it is hard ...”

“... a taste of what it’s like to be a congressman.’ Under these lines was a picture of the rioter Richard Barnett with his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. The nationalist blog Guancha claimed that ‘everyone will feel admiration for Wang’s prophecy … Looking at the United States today, it has fallen even further.’ The general feeling was that America ...”

“... noted’ in the New Yorker. It sold around 1700 copies: those who wanted to read about a doleful scholar with a problematic wife didn’t show up en masse until September, when Viking also published Saul Bellow’s Herzog. In February 1966, however, an appreciation by Irving Howe of Williams’s ‘serious, beautiful and affecting novel’ appeared in the ...”

“... and surveys a number of translators who were information-gatherers for their paymasters (Richard Burton, for example, the maker of a steamy Arabian Nights). Briggs lobbied hard for the job of translating Roland Barthes’s famous lecture series at the Collège de France, and, in spite of being a newcomer to ‘this little art’, was ...”

“... author of the magisterial Music in Western Civilisation – was never slow to point this out: ‘A scholar who, like a Hindu ascetic immersed in self-contemplation, confines himself to his narrow field of specialisation, loses the larger view. The first requirement for the musicologist is to realise that the choice of studying other disciplines is governed not ...”

“... one to allow us to glimpse a life of companionship of the kind to which John Milton aspired in a scholar’s marriage: his wife’s chamber was placed next to his study in the house which he most frequently occupied, ‘a proximity’, MacCulloch says, ‘which not all scholars have welcomed in their marriages’. Still, companionship is one thing, love ...”

“... should be a job for ‘printers’ workmen or others with time on their hands’, not a great scholar without even a single research assistant, and dismissed the idea as typical of printers’ lust for profits. But the task grew on him as he worked. Reading through a thousand huge pages crammed with inscriptions, bent nib in hand, Scaliger came to see the ...”

“... on a grander if more theoretical subject. The Principles of Government, in a Dialogue between a Scholar and a Peasant (1782) was again published as a free pamphlet by the Society for Constitutional Information. In the discursive context of elite republicanism (Jones first wrote it in French for coterie circulation), there was nothing particularly outspoken ...”

“... as a historian of Newtonian natural philosophy, he started working with the great émigré scholar Alexandre Koyré on a new presentation of the variations between the three Latin editions of the Principia published in Newton’s lifetime. Koyré died in 1964 and the variorum edition eventually appeared from Harvard in 1971 with the invaluable aid of ...”

“... disagreements and perhaps resentments, too. The practice did well enough for Scott to be sent as a scholar to Eton. There he was well taught and met the rich men’s sons who would be his best future clients. But there were ambiguities. Scott was meant to succeed his father. In those days English architects like Sir Gilbert stood halfway between trade and ...”

“... it has to be admitted that there is not much left of the carcase of Pirenne’s thesis. Yet, as Richard Hodges says, it obstinately refuses to disappear. If one reason for this is that economists never agree, another, as he also says, is that the very sparseness of the evidence leaves almost infinite room for argument: we have, for example, no early ...”