“... 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 ...”

“... but developed its own distinct identity as a province of its empire.’ Virgil would be delighted. Richard Hingley’s book deals with the troublesome process of uncovering Roman Britain. This is difficult territory. He explores how, between 1586 (the date of William Camden’s Britannia) and 1906 (when Francis Haverfield’s lecture on ‘The Romanisation of ...”

“... himself disciplining those members of his flock who were influenced by Tom Paine or by the prophet Richard Brothers (‘God’s nephew’). He published one tract entitled The Moral Law not Injured by the Everlasting Gospel. That might seem to take us closer to Blake but in fact it does not, since if Blake had written such a tract its title would have been ...”

“... and letters’ mode. There has been no recapture in the round of the man himself. Now Richard Mabey has repaired this deficiency. He has been back to such records as survive (and there are more of these, it appears, than we have been accustomed to suppose); he has read, or read afresh, everything of White’s that has found its way into print; and ...”

“... politics in France. He has gone on to write more than a hundred pieces for the LRB, as an Oxford scholar whose politics were to the left of the editor’s (Karl Miller favoured the SDP, while Johnson favoured Labour). Nowadays I think he’d still say he was on the left but it isn’t obvious what that would mean, in his case especially. Like many people, he ...”

“... in Western philosophy: that women were neither made for, nor capable of, reasoned thought. As the scholar Bathsua Makin put it in 1673, ‘it is verily believed … that Women are not endued with such Reason, as Men; nor capable of improvement by Education, as they are. It is lookt upon as a monstrous thing, to pretend the contrary. A Learned Woman is thought ...”

“... which, to borrow Boswell’s verdict on the aristocratic pretensions of Johnson’s friend Richard Savage, ‘the world must vibrate in a state of uncertainty’). But what of the ‘perpetual confinement’ as Johnson’s caretaker, which she described in her first published book, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson? In her arranged literary marriage ...”

“... and bearing. Above all, the British public tends to salute resilience in adversity; and for a scholar could there be any greater trauma than the terrible humbling and hounding of the proud, stoical Trevor-Roper in the aftermath of the Hitler Diaries fiasco? Yet Trevor-Roper never quite attained the status of national treasure notwithstanding an appearance ...”

“... there no great women artists?’ was first put to Linda Nochlin in 1970 by the New York gallerist Richard Feigen. It was a genuine inquiry. He would love, he said, to show women artists. The problem was he couldn’t find any good enough. Stumped for an answer at the time, Nochlin continued to consider the question. Her response came a year later in the form ...”

“... portrait composed of largely asserted values illuminating and convincing: disappointingly, in Richard Schacht’s introduction such an enquiry, which would indeed be timely, is not attempted. The last essay, ‘Wagner in Bayreuth’, is designed as an apotheosis of the Master on the occasion of the first Bayreuth Festival of July 1876. ‘In ...”

“... the alliance is ominous. The London-Shepard family has not in the past encouraged the inquisitive scholar. Charmian London’s first response to an independent biographical account of her husband – Rose Wilder Lane’s articles in Sunset Magazine a year after Jack’s death – was to squelch the project. The widow’s publicly-given reason for suppression ...”

“... by a genuine elasticity of spirit but by a plodding movement’. He knew his shortcomings as a scholar, too, and resolved in his diary that he would in future be ‘avoiding scholarship on account of inability’. He noted of a damning review by E.A. Freeman of his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age that it ‘ought to humble me’. But it didn’t. On ...”

“... The KGB? Mossad? The Mafia? Fidel Castro? Anti-Castro rebels? Power-hungry Lyndon Johnson? Bitter Richard Nixon? No fewer than four government investigations pursued various leads, producing thousands of pages of turgid prose, and adding fuel to accusations of cover-ups. Groupuscules of assassination buffs, each clinging to its pet conspiracy theory with ...”

“... chart homophobic legislation around the globe – a perfect inversion of the 19th-century Arabist Richard Burton’s ‘Sotadic Zone’, a vast geographical space, named for the scurrilous Greek poet Sotades, in which the ‘vice’ of homosexuality was allegedly rife. This widening chasm between a liberated ‘us’ and a repressed ‘them’ has created ...”

“... origins, ethos, distinguished former pupils, class-rating, and so on. If he befriends a Classics scholar he instantly requests, and gets, a spirited defence of Greek and Latin. The English call their private schools public schools and Mehta tells us why – which seems a bit much in a book published by John Murray. Christopher Hill – he of the ...”