“... 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 ...”

“... variety of chivalric culture in which literacy had a place. But knights were hard men. The great scholar Abelard, to be sure, was taught to read and write as his knightly father had been before him, but he also learned the aggression of his social class and brought the competitiveness of the duel to his scholarly debates. Churchmen attempted to harness the ...”

“... by a second hero, Mr Ralph Bateman. Mr Laurence is primarily and most formidably a bibliographical scholar. His bibliography of Shaw is awaited by all those engaged in Shaw studies with something of the frenzy of telephone subscribers without directories. One of the chief features of Shaw’s Music is the 125,000 words that Mr Laurence has patiently and ...”

“... as rallying the family together for the next dreadful challenge that faces them. The 19th-century scholar Fustel de Coulanges had on the basis of current practice among the French nobility supposed that the Greeks worshipped their ancestors, and that from that practice developed the notion of the larger kinship groups called phratriai which survived as ...”

“... Star declares here, and his collection offers helpful accounts of influential thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Benedict Anderson and the radical-turned-Neo-Conservative historian Eugene Genovese, as well as thoughtful reviews of significant debates, such as the contested legacy of Darwin (Stephen Jay Gould v. sociobiology), the stake of revisionist ...”

“... trouble of getting Gregory Elliott to edit it – out of respect for a man who is not only a major scholar of Soviet history but also a figure of distinction in the world of radical historians. On the assumption that many people will approach the book wanting to know how he has reacted to recent developments and archival discoveries in Russia, and whether ...”

“... Not that the reluctant novelist was uneducated. In his youth, he had been a good Latin scholar; later he taught himself French and Italian; when mathematics engaged his interest, he travelled once a week to Birmingham to study with a teacher there. Bage brought to novel-writing a well-stocked mind and wide-ranging curiosity. The novel – that ...”

“... Pope adds in a manuscript comment that he may have had from the struggling poet and hellraiser Richard Savage. In typically tantalising style, Curll alleged in print that the ill-matched babes were ‘Offspring of a Poet and a Bookseller’. The first task for any Haywood biographer, plainly, is to clear away the flak and innuendo. Some years ago, King ...”

“... and pen. The many narrative tributaries first came together in a single stream when the French scholar and antiquarian Antoine Galland used a 14th or 15th-century Syrian manuscript he had brought back from his travels in the Middle East as the basis for seven volumes of stories that he entitled Les Mille et Une Nuits, which appeared between 1701 and ...”

“... And finally, after re-establishing contact with Amy Bellette, he finds himself entangled with Richard Kliman, a ruthless young scholar who is writing E.I. Lonoff’s biography, in which he will reveal the scandal buried far in his subject’s past which he believes is the key to Lonoff’s work. Which reminds us of the ...”

“... the poor in any case. In 1391, ten years after the Peasants’ Revolt, the House of Commons asked Richard II to forbid serfs from sending their children to school, in order to ‘save the honour of all freemen of the realm’ (the king did nothing about it). Whatever his connections with the Peasants’ Revolt itself, the curiously cross-grained author of ...”

“... of the story rests on an 18th-century source. This places Somer as a servant in the household of Richard Fermor, a Northamptonshire Catholic, whose property, fool included, Henry seized after finding Fermor guilty of assisting an imprisoned priest. (The coupling of Fermor and Somer remains unverified.)In Fool: In Search of Henry VIII’s Closest Man, the ...”

“... as though he were inexorably being subsumed by dreams and shadows. The French translator and scholar Pierre Hourcade, who visited Lisbon in 1933, remembered leaving a café with Pessoa, and walking with him for a few blocks. Hourcade had, Richard Zenith writes, ‘this uncanny sensation: that the poet, as soon as he ...”