“... Late in the​ 1460s, Leon Battista Alberti wrote a book on ciphers. It was a dialogue between him and a longtime friend, Leonardo Dati, who had recently been made head of the papal secretariat. Like many of Alberti’s writings, On Composing Ciphers was highly original: the first European text to propose a polyalphabetic cipher, which used coding wheels, and to explain the principles of cryptanalysis, which his cipher was designed to baffle ...”

“... Libraries​ were all the rage in Renaissance Europe, and no wonder. Theatres of knowledge, grandly decorated and proudly displayed, they hosted dramas of many kinds. Learned men used them for lively conversation on such irresistible topics as the philosophies of Hermes, Zoroaster and Pythagoras or relations between the later Roman Empire and the Persian king Shapur II, which Angelo Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola and others debated in the new Florentine library of San Marco ...”

“... The 17th-century antiquary John Selden spent his life deciphering Greek inscriptions and interpreting Near Eastern myths. No scholar of his time had more experience with the historical study of material remains; no one knew better how easily a modern intellectual can read too much into an ancient object. As he remarked one day, ‘It was an excellent question of my lady Cotton, when Sir Robert Cotton was magnifying of a shoe, which was Mose’s or Noah’s, and wondering at the strange shape and fashion of it: But Mr Cotton, says she, are you sure it is a shoe?’ The 20th-century art historian Martin Kemp has spent his life reconstructing the techniques with which Italian Renaissance artists analysed and represented the natural world: the science of art, as he once called it ...”

“... Even in the middle years of the 17th century, when Athanasius Kircher’s career reached its peak, nobody knew exactly what to make of him. Descartes, who described him as ‘more charlatan than scholar’, classed his enormous erudite books among the many that he refused on principle to read. John Evelyn, visiting Rome in 1644, was impressed when ‘with Dutch patience, he showed us his perpetual motions, catoptrics, magnetical experiments, models, and a thousand other crotchets and devices ...”

“... New York​ was a great book town in the 1960s. You could buy new books in English at the elegant Scribner shop on Fifth Avenue, new books in French at the Librairie de France or Rizzoli, and old books in German at Mary S. Rosenberg’s austere, packed shop on Broadway, where neither I nor another obsessive friend could afford $100 for a first edition of Winckelmann’s history of ancient art ...”

“... The sight that confronted the French Protestant d’Origny Delaloge when he left his London house at nine o’clock one morning in 1707 struck him as out of the ordinary. A fellow Huguenot, wearing a blond wig, a black suit with a damask vest and a hat with a rose on it, stood before the house and addressed him, first in English and then in French. He identified himself as Jean Le Clerc, the celebrated philologist and theologian from Holland who had edited the complete Latin works of Erasmus, produced a widely read periodical and written the first systematic modern manual of critical method, the Ars Critica ...”

“... work to do: ‘Grant I have mastered learning’s crabbed text,/Still there’s the comment.’ Anthony Grafton’s book is a commentary on the comment, some of it made, as Browning puts it, ‘shortly after the revival of learning in Europe’, though its scope is much wider than that. Copious commentary wasn’t a humanist invention: it had adorned ...”

“... art. To find astrology funny must be an effect of ignorance, since now we have the authority of Anthony Grafton to tell us that it is serious. Grafton has recently become known in England as the author of an elegant history of the footnote, but this is the tip of an iceberg of learning, though a good example of his ...”

“... is like Hamlet: someone is always seeing it for the first time, but rarely with fresh perceptions. Anthony Pagden’s European Encounters with the New World recounts episodes in a long history in which ‘the newness of America was recognised, confronted and explained’. Anthony Grafton’s New Worlds, Ancient Texts is ...”

“... completely.In nine portraits – of antiquarians, palaeographers, philosophers and polymaths – Anthony Grafton describes the texture of intellectual life from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Grafton’s work has charted the development of scholarship, books, the classical tradition and of history writing ...”

“... art is said to be a footnote to Alberti, just as all philosophy is said to be a footnote to Plato. Anthony Grafton admits that he comes to Alberti not as an art historian but as an outsider. On the other hand, outsiders can revitalise a subject withered by odium academicum, and Grafton has achieved this in the first ...”

“... Rome’. The lively new study of Renaissance Humanism by two scholars separated by the Atlantic, Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, has much in common with the other books discussed here, despite an attempt by the authors to distance themselves from what they call ‘the new social history’ and to concern themselves ‘not with context but with ...”

“... be prosecuted by the DPP. It would be sensible to replace the term ‘literary forgery’ with Anthony Grafton’s neologism, ‘pseudepigrapha’. This blanket description would cover everything from Chatterton’s fake poems to George MacDonald Fraser’s ‘Flashman’ spoofs without any automatic presumptions of wrong-doing. Carter and Pollard’s ...”

“... simple-minded or single-minded. Narrative can be capacious as well as directional. Burrow and Anthony Grafton are as capacious as can be. Their question is not so much ‘how did it come to this?’ – in Grafton’s case, to a more critical historicism in the 17th and 18th centuries; in Burrow’s, to ...”

“... of his own. Bernays was a far better scholar than Pattison, but even his work has limitations, as Grafton has observed with much acuteness. Rightly seeing Scaliger as a precursor of the monumental scholarship of his own time – Scaliger’s affinity with Mommsen has often been remarked – Bernays represented him as though he were a scholar of the 19th ...”