“... possibility of a contemplative life. From then on, the burden of proof was on those who (like St Thomas Aquinas) thought that Aristotle was not wholly wrong, and that curiosity might not be simply a vice (the excitation of an unruly member, the inquiring eye as homologue of the pushy penis). Blumenberg takes very seriously indeed the episcopal condemnation ...”

“... gift-giving of the opening act and the nihilistic isolation of his ending. The topicality of Nicholas Hytner’s production was heightened by the interpolation of passages from Coriolanus, which brought angry citizens into the play. Alcibiades was portrayed less as a disaffected soldier, exiled from Athens and returning to conquer it, than as a rallying ...”

“... here. First there is the economical Miesian minicampus of the Catholic University of St Thomas, built in the late Fifties, a place and moment at which, as Stephen Fox says, ‘the spirit of the new entered Houston.’ Nearly twenty years later he designed with John Burgee the first of his giant commercial buildings, Pennzoil Place. It stands towards ...”

“... life went on as usual. Names central to Renaissance scholarship appear on page after page – Thomas More, Peter Giles, Martin Dorpius, Pirckheimer, Amerbach, Tunstall, Lascaris, Zazius. So do the names of people for whom Erasmus scholars feel especial warmth – Grocyn, say, or William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who put up with a great ...”

“... of literary fraud. One of his first publications, Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782), takes sixty exhaustive pages to demolish those who still believed that Chatterton’s poems were genuinely medieval, and his edition of Shakespeare devotes thirty more to discrediting a feeble pseudo-Jacobean pamphlet published forty years ...”

“... caprice, but a nymphomaniac and serial adulteress who was properly tried and legally executed. Thomas More, the genial philosopher, was not a saint but a sadistic bigot. The real Mary Tudor wasn’t the hate figure of myth. Pious, well-meaning and emotionally fragile, she’d been manipulated by Cardinal Pole, a ruthless éminence rouge with his sights on ...”

“... approach predicts the incommensurability of sufficiently divergent outlooks, anticipating Thomas Kuhn on the structure of scientific revolutions by more than thirty years. He went on to interpret causal laws and conditional statements not in terms of causal or conditional facts but by appeal to rules for judgment. To hold that if A happens B will ...”

“... in London, no goods were to be sold after Vespers (around 6 p.m.), marked by the bell of St Thomas the Martyr of Acon; Compline, struck on the bells of St Martin’s Le Grand, marked the closure of the taverns and the city curfew.Devotional attention to time encouraged the development of devices to measure it. The most ubiquitous instrument was the ...”

“... come out. They may have been buried beneath my feet, in this tiny anchorhold in the church of St Nicholas in the village of Compton in Surrey. An anchorite or anchoress permanently encloses themselves in a cell to live a life of prayer and contemplation. The word comes from the Greek ἀναχωρεῖν (‘anachorein’) meaning ‘to retire or ...”

“... of Carpenter’s best stories, Auden’s marriage and more particularly its immediate aftermath. Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika – who though once-married was not very likely to marry again – was a cabaret artiste whose heroically anti-Nazi material had lost her her German passport, and who therefore approached the nearest Englishman, Christopher ...”

“... it still takes what Hegel described as the valet’s perspective on the future of the continent. Thomas Meaney GreeceTwo years ago, David Cameron saw himself out of office, respecting the result of the referendum he had unwisely called. For three years now, Alexis Tsipras has clung to power in Athens by disrespecting the results of his own referendum. The ...”

“... sensibility’ always contained a European admixture, and Figes criticises those – Rilke, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf – who swallowed whole the myth of a completely indigenous ‘Russian soul’. All the great Russians ‘were Europeans too, and the two identities were intertwined and mutually dependent in a variety of ways’. Natasha’s Dance ...”

“... Terry Harknett writes under the buckskin-evoking pseudonyms of George G. Gilman, Charles R. Pike, Thomas H. Stone. Like his compatriots ‘John G. MeLaglen’ and J.T. Edson, Harknett has ‘appreciation societies’ devoted to his pseudonymous personae. (‘J.T.’, incidentally, the biggest seller of them all, claims his name is genuine. It’s a happy ...”

“... 2001) is unhelpful. In Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (2001), Nicholas Dirks does a first-rate job of summarising the debate between English historians of India, such as Christopher Bayly and David Washbrook, who downplay the corrupting nature of empire by assigning a good deal of the blame to Indian ‘agents and ...”

“... of any specific technology. In 1676, he went to see the Duke’s Company perform Thomas Shadwell’s lampoon of Royal Society ‘virtuosi’ and was mortified because he was convinced it was so obviously directed at him that the audience ‘almost pointed’. Shadwell’s virtuoso was concerned only with the ‘speculative part’ of ...”