“... a sharp eye for detail – not unlike many of Freya Stark’s early sketches. But she was also a scholar, and went on to produce a translation of the great poet Hafez which is still reckoned one of the finest in English. In between Arabic, Persian and archaeological studies, she went climbing in Switzerland, scaling several unconquered peaks as well as the ...”

“... be a day when a shorthand citation like “McMaster 8:279” will be sufficient affidavit for the scholar of the authenticity and location of any quotation of Russell’s written word.’ With this ringing prophecy, William Ready, the General Editor of the McMaster University Library Press and the man who brought the Russell archives to McMaster in ...”

“... began to produce books. In the library Kazin sometimes sat across from his friend the historian Richard Hofstadter, who was also writing his first book, and their simultaneous composition was also a form of becoming. The battle Kazin had all his writers fight in On Native Grounds was a battle against an uncaring America, a vast industrial civilisation. He ...”

“... good one in some respects, appeared in 1912. It was by Aleyn Lyell Reade, an old style gentleman-scholar and genealogist who lived with his sisters in a house in Blundellsands, near Liverpool, and devoted much of his life to a fastidiously documented part-work, Johnsonian Gleanings, published in 11 volumes (1909-52); the Barber study (‘Francis Barber: The ...”

“... read Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1682), with its delicate possible parallel between the dunce writer Richard Flecknoe and Charles II, but not Nero the Second. Charles can’t be twinned with Flecknoe as straightforwardly as George I with Nero but, as Keymer shows, it’s the non-straightforwardness of the parallel – the way it’s built up from detail to ...”

“... from whom a degree of advocacy is appropriate. ‘In Solitude, for Company’, together with Richard Davenport-Hines’s new biography of the poet, provides further confirmation that Audens are a definite buy. The wavering flame of academic attention has been nursed through the dangerous, immediately posthumous years, and is now – with some help from ...”

“... and minds. The Kentish gospeller John Newman explained the matter to the turncoat bishop of Dover, Richard Thornden. He and his fellow gospellers, he declared, had drunk too deep of the teaching of the Edwardine reformers to renounce it simply on command. For, he told Thornden, their doctrine was not beleued of vs sodainly, but by their continuall ...”

“... agitated emotion and toning down many of its adventures, his translation is readable in a way that Richard Burton’s lurid and archaisising version, made fifty years later, is not. Lane expurgated, Burton fantasticated. There have been many wilful translations in the book’s history, a history that in its geographical, linguistic and picaresque range echoes ...”

“... the public emotion. These long poems are not well known in the West, and it is very useful to have Richard Chappell’s version of 1905 in a paperback edition, with a translation in similar rhythms opposite the Russian. Equally valuable are Michael Harari’s Russian plus English translation of the poems written between 1955 and 1959, published in the same ...”

“... which is held by some of his actors: the self-conscious forgetting and rejection of history. Richard Perle, a former Defense Department official and adviser to Bush, reports that for the president ‘the world began on 9/11. There’s no intellectual history.’ ‘History begins today,’ chimed in ...”

“... her own. Or named, as Clarissa is named for Mrs Dalloway, making her party for the Aids-stricken Richard a reprise. In fact, in Specimen Days, Whitman is not read at all. He is spoken, his words endlessly cited by the central character of each of the three tales. They cannot help it. Whitman takes over their voice. ‘He hadn’t meant to speak as the ...”

“... readers? A few scholars have solved this difficulty by adopting a narrow geographical format. Richard White’s The Middle Ground (1991), for example, is a brilliant history of how the French, British and American empires interacted both with each other and with native Indians over two centuries in the Great Lakes region of North America. But what if one ...”

“... competition of vulgar ‘empiricks’, often peddled their own proprietary nostrums. The great Dr Richard Mead hawked a rabies powder under his own name; Dr Hans Sloane marketed medicinal chocolate; Dr Nehemiah Grew took out a patent on Epsom Salts. How to make a medical reputation in such a world? How to make a medical living? A satirist advised the upwardly ...”

“... For Eliot, as for many Anglo-Catholics, Andrewes was an iconic ancestor figure. Along with Richard Hooker, George Herbert and William Laud, this ‘right reverend Father in God’ seemed to embody Catholic continuity and spiritual moderation. The English Church, these men believed, had maintained amid all the upheavals of the Protestant reformation a ...”

“... extraction and endurance beyond anything even Ovid could have conjured up.’Working is a literary scholar and appreciates, for example, the parallel pliability of poetry and metallurgy. Words and phrases, like precious metals, ‘could be melted, spun and twisted’, resisting obliteration. Surveying an era when between 60 and 80 per cent of the world’s ...”