“... 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 ...”

“... was in the hands of New College, Oxford, and they do not appear to have patronised reformers. Richard White, vicar in 1561, was called to the church courts for the erroneous belief ‘that men had free will to do good and bad,’ and William Lambert, vicar from 1574 to 1592, used holy water in baptism freely, and preached rarely. Much of the work of ...”

“... grandsons and granddaughters of the magus living in France now). Ouspensky was an original and a scholar; before he ever met Gurdjieff he had experimented with two techniques now fashionable, ‘lucid’ dreaming and consciousness-expansion by drugs. For many years he led an earnest and secretive group of mind-improvers in England; after his death it became ...”

“... believe, did them in. There is some truth in each of these explanations. H.W. Brands, a prolific scholar of modern American history, adds his own contribution to the list. In this latest book, he defines liberalism as confidence in the ability of the national government to pursue the social good, and argues that in a country whose default position is ...”

“... Français – works by painters who are very little known to the British public, including Fleury Richard, Pierre Révoil, Henriette Lorimer, François-Marius Granet and Louis Daguerre (famous for his photography but not his paintings). In these works, moonlight on broken stone tracery is a common motif; dark interiors provide a foil for stained glass and for ...”

“... gorgeous 13th-century mosaic Cosmati pavement in front of the high altar, and the portrait of Richard II, the abbey’s other profligate royal patron. It hangs almost unnoticed off a pier just by the West Door, the first contemporaneous likeness of an English king, and a rare instance of 14th-century northern European portraiture. The abbey, as much a ...”

“... to the Turks, who were often denounced for degeneracy – swords, slippers and sexual excess, as Richard Cobden put it – the Arabs were often admired for manly simplicity. David Urquhart, secretary at the embassy in Constantinople, wrote that Islam was not a false religion to be ridiculed: it taught no new dogmas, propounded no fanciful revelation and ...”

“... 2 August. I don’t know where I’m going’). Should we say, then, with the veteran Stendhal scholar V. del Litto, that the sheer disarray is what is striking, that if Stendhal had not written La Chartreuse soon after much of this groping stuff we might well think his vocation as a novelist was a myth? It is true that Stendhal is the sort of writer the ...”

“... like ‘loony Left’, a term invented by opponents. It is not likely that Coppe or Bauthumley or Richard Coppin would have assented to the sobriquet. As for the historians, perhaps Cohn, in The Pursuit of the Millennium, was a little credulous, since his thesis required that millennial sects be seen at their most crazy. But Morton, Hill and others have ...”

“... against the modern business practices of newfangled Quakers and Jews. (It is not surprising that Richard Ingrams of Private Eye should think G.K. Chesterton’s biography of Cobbett the best.) Hazlitt supported the Jews as much as the Catholics, and he rebuked Cobbett quite fiercely for being a ‘bullying antagonist’ to the Quakers. Though he admired and ...”

“... he gets rave reviews from all sorts of famous people. The president of the Federal Republic, Richard von Weizsäcker, sends Stern a note to tell him that he had read one of his lectures ‘with liveliest interest and gratitude’; McGeorge Bundy says that he thought another piece ‘uncommonly good’ and Lionel Trilling found an earlier draft of it ...”

“... He was mad, but he was not just mad. There is more to know. This is the historical lacuna that Richard Noll exploits in his disturbing and often illuminating book. Noll comes to the quest for the historical Jung – his phrase – with a broad background in Jungianism, psychiatry and shamanism and his training stands him in good stead much of the time. He ...”

“... on at least one military recruitment broadside during the Napoleonic Wars, but they are spoken by Richard the Lionheart’s illegitimate son over the usurping John’s poisoned corpse. Even without the undercutting produced by a knowledge of its dramatic context, the play’s final couplet contains a big ‘if’: ‘Naught shall make us rue/If England to ...”

“... Imperial House in the Postwar Era, 1945-2019, Kenneth Ruoff, the pre-eminent English-speaking scholar of the contemporary imperial house, identifies the distinctive strands of Akihitoism.* Among them are his ‘efforts to compress the margins of [Japanese] society’ by engaging in person with the disabled, disadvantaged and victims of natural ...”

“... light by Wordsworth, as an example of all that was merely poeticised. In a letter to his friend Richard West, Gray happily declared the very attitudes to poetic diction that Wordsworth was later to detect and condemn. ‘The language of the age is never the language of poetry,’ he observed. By which he meant that it never should be. ‘Our poetry ...”