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“... count. George James Symons, one of those energetic Victorians who combined the erudition of a scholar with the organisational abilities of a manager and the enthusiasm of an amateur collector, realised what was needed and put it in place: a countrywide network of volunteer rainfall observers. From 1859, making a daily note of rainfall became a popular ...”

“... from capitalism. Slavery, she argued, was not an expression of racism, much less, as one hapless scholar had described it, ‘the ultimate segregator’; if Europeans were seeking the ‘“ultimate” method of segregating Africans’, why did they go ‘to the trouble and expense of transporting them across the ocean for that purpose, when they could have ...”

“... fired by rabid anti-semitism or inspired by Völkisch crankiness that figure on the fringes of Richard Griffiths’s Fellow Travellers of the Right (1980), a book to which Kershaw pays just tribute. A peer of his standing did not consort with plebs and outsiders. He was the most respectable, and because of his coalmines in County Durham the richest, of the ...”

“... or read on Robben Island by Nelson Mandela.) Perhaps this is the assertion of a Shakespearean scholar over-anxious to demonstrate that his subject still matters outside the seminar room, even at the cost of ceding Shakespeare’s cultural capital to the extreme right. But the KKK and their MAGA fellow-travellers would have gone on the rampage even if ...”

“... altogether. ‘The dead are not as dead there as they are in our own society,’ the religious scholar Herman Ooms writes. ‘It has always made perfect sense in Japan as far back as history goes to treat the dead as more alive than we do … even to the extent that death becomes a variant, not a negation of life.’ At the heart of ancestor worship is a ...”

“... the bill came, he had vanished, leaving his fuming guests to pay up. The internationally famous scholar had apparently unmasked himself as a vulgar conman. The grubby final chapter of this episode confirmed what Delaloge already suspected. This ‘Le Clerc’ was not the literary celebrity he claimed to be, but an impostor: a former monk named ...”

“... built in the mid-16th century, as the ne plus ultra of aspirational timber framing. The carpenter, Richard Dale, whose name appears with that of the owner, William Moreton, on one of the windows, gave the framing a raking design which creates on the exterior an elaborate dazzle effect. Starting out with an H-plan house, Dale and Moreton added every latest ...”

“... to insist on his greatness? Because Coleridge isn’t in this book, in the way that he isin Richard Holmes’s recent, sensitive profile in the Oxford ‘Past Masters’ series. Does a study like Levere’s miss some point, or is one merely making an obvious remark about the difference between ‘biography’ and ‘intellectual history’? Authors and ...”

“... explained everything, the fault line in 20th-century consciousness. The gaunt, close-cropped scholar, hugging himself against the cold on a late-season esplanade, is like one of those small birds who pick meat from a crocodile’s teeth. He has chased Ackroyd, dogged him, as the stone-throwing ‘Deputy’ worries Stony Durdles in The Mystery of Edwin ...”

“... of the scholarly sarcasm that was perfected a century later by the great Cambridge classical scholar Richard Bentley. But it suggests that Chapman was less motivated by a desire to understand Homeric society in itself than to insist to his vernacular readers that he alone was the truest and best interpreter of Homer. Chapman got it wrong here, as he ...”

“... this position during the period with which we are concerned.’ Thus, the introduction of Sir Richard Southern’s Making of the Middle Ages. Bartlett quoted it in a perceptive recent tribute to Southern, with the rider that ‘every century has its protagonists,’ but ‘those who see the 11th and 12th centuries as a time of particularly significant ...”

“... for the future. Odoevtsev, like Pankratov, is personally involved: his grandfather, a famous scholar, was denounced by his father and sent to Siberia; now, freed and rehabilitated, the old man returns to Leningrad; Odoevtsev visits him, suffering, in a brilliantly written scene, agonies of embarrassment, not so much from the emotional problems as from ...”

“... a result one is often gloriously not quite sure where one is. To be uncertain for a moment whether Richard Corbet’s ‘Distracted Puritan’ (‘Come heare me pray nine times a day,/And fill your heads with Crotchets’) comes from the 1640s or from the 1620s gives a very good impression of the way poems from the earlier part of the period were transformed ...”

“... epic’. We might also compare him with the hero-villains of Shakespeare, with Brutus, Macbeth or Richard III, raging at the ghosts of their victims. Francis Phelan is not a pathetic old man: he is frightening. When we walk guiltily past the alcoholic tramps of Charing Cross, there are some who seem too degraded to be helped and others who seem too ...”

“... him to remain hidden, the man in the mask, detached, even disdainful. The walking embodiment of Richard Sennett’s 18th-century public man, Cuvier vigilantly kept up his public front in an age increasingly given over to effusions of Romantic sincerity and authenticity. The real Cuvier thus remains concealed for good behind the smokescreens of ...”