“... are meagre, especially at the beginning of the period, their ensemble forms a large corpus for one scholar to tackle, not least since each conversion, its memory nursed by national historians, has sprouted its own modern historiography. It is this ensemble, stretching across a millennium and round thousands of miles of coastline, that ...”

“... chemistry, quarrelled with leading figures and advanced slowly. His close friend, the chemist Richard Willstätter, said that Haber’s ‘early failure was complete and of long duration’. Einstein had his doctoral thesis rejected, was turned down as a teaching assistant, and complained in 1901 that he had offered himself unsuccessfully to every ...”

“... for the revolutionary naturalism of his acting style, notably his startling performance as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and George Colman were already members and Richard Brinsley Sheridan would be admitted a few years later. The Club wasn’t just full of ...”

“... academics might seem an unlikely topic for him. He found out about their work after the economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein suggested in a joint review of Moneyball that the story of Billy Beane, the general manager of the baseball team the Oakland Athletics, could be read as a case study in support ...”

“... reading his way through his father’s library before entering Balliol College, Oxford as a scholar in 1931. University prizes plus a fellowship at All Souls followed his graduation in 1934, and after a two-year interval as a lecturer at Cardiff he, almost inevitably, returned to Balliol as a tutorial fellow in 1938. The college was to remain his ...”

“... Walsingham ran it for Elizabeth I.) Today the hounds are in pursuit of Andrew Gow, the Classical scholar and art collector who was Blunt’s mentor at Trinity. Gow, who had taught at Eton, devoted part of his life to editing Nicander, a didactic Greek poet who wrote poems on snake-bites, poisons and their remedies – there is surely a whiff here of ...”

“... notes, does not seem to have occurred to the largely well-born purists. (He quotes one modern scholar, Anselmo González Climent, warning that flamenco singers, to retain their bardic force, need to be protected from encroaching literacy.) Nor, in their rush to guard this art of the people from polluters, have they stopped to notice that the people are ...”

“... in six editions during his life, and in two more by 1640. The most popular of the plays were Richard III and Richard II, each of which went through five editions before 1616. Romeo and Juliet went through four; Hamlet appeared in three. For readers since the 18th century, the narrative poems have been at best marginal ...”

“... in Vigo Street. Named after that extremely respectable figure Sir Thomas Bodley – scholar, diplomat and founder of the Bodleian – the firm quickly and almost accidentally became synonymous with beautifully-produced, often wickedly illustrated, rather decadent publications. Lane, described by a colleague as being one who published ‘for the ...”

“... Sitwells and see what happens.’ It is hard to imagine how the 17-year-old Christ Church music scholar might or might have not developed had Sacheverell Sitwell not met him and decided that his ‘very clever-shaped head’ recalled John Wesley. Of William’s Sitwell friends, Sachie was the intimate, however exhausting: ‘one weekend at Sachie’s house ...”

“... specific questions for the theory to answer. Responding to this challenge, Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman invented novel ways of tackling the problem. Some of the steps had already been taken earlier by Sin-Itiro Tomonaga in Japan. Dyson was the first to understand the approaches both of Schwinger and of Feynman, and to demonstrate that, while ...”

“... The Communist Connection. Dr Possony is, in Claire Sterling’s words, a ‘meticulous scholar’; he also works for the Hoover Institute. When you move on to the life-histories of the terrorists the picture is much the same: a hotchpotch of innuendo, gossip and speculation surrounds nuggets of fact. When Feltrinelli went to Bolivia he ‘may just ...”

“... his own characteristic kind of verse: Howard Staunton, the British champion and a Shakespearian scholar, speaking in witty, allusive pentameters; Richard Morphy, his young American challenger, with a suitably wilder six-stress line, barely controlled by a caesura in the middle. Staunton addresses his wife, while Morphy ...”

“... cake. He had had, both during his life and since, a deserved measure of admiration as a scholar, a lawyer, a writer and a politician; for there is much in Robert Bolt’s adulatory A Man for All Seasons which reflects what we know of More. But More was not simply a principled Catholic; he was also something of a fanatic. The Victorian historian ...”

“... John, now in his nineties and still occasionally practising, came to Balliol as a Rhodes Scholar from New Zealand in 1928. He boxed, rowed and through the Carlton Club became a protégé of Nancy Astor. Their friendship continued, with some alarming contact with a blood-and-nation group called the English Mistery and the offer by an emissary of the ...”