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“... library to rival that of Alexandria; at its peak it contained 200,000 volumes. According to Pliny, Ptolemy of Egypt was so enraged by his neighbour’s acquisitive habits that he banned the sale of papyrus. Eumenes instructed his subjects to find an alternative writing material, and parchment was born. Where plant-based papyrus was fibrous, brittle and liable ...”

“... or even planned – of a skeleton hurling a spear. It would also fit with the impression left by Ptolemy Dean’s attractively gentle watercolours, which he includes as illustrations to Sir John Soane and the Country Estate (a careful study of ten of Soane’s best-preserved country house schemes). These prove, as clearly as anyone could wish, that a ...”

“... act of hubris. Celestial models didn’t only provide opportunities for philosophical discourse. Ptolemy wrote a treatise on Planetary Hypotheses, which addressed the problem of how to create models of the heavens that would reflect current astronomical knowledge. He seemed to regard them as scientific instruments and teaching aids. While not common ...”

“... scholars and scientists, complementing the more authoritative but less entertaining works of Ptolemy. The Greek humanist Gemistos Plethon brought a copy of Strabo with him to the 1439 ecumenical council in Florence that attempted a reunification of eastern and western churches; he lectured on Strabo to Florentines between council sessions. In this way ...”

“... by laughter unto death; for those affected in this way, the remedy is to drink from the other.’ Ptolemy identified the Canary Islands as the Islands of the Blessed and used them as a reference point for defining the zero meridian. In 1851 the astronomer George Airy identified Greenwich as the prime meridian. Did he believe it was also set on a blessed ...”

“... had been determined by tradition and empirical evidence dating back at least to Posidonius and Ptolemy. Another figure would later have been calculated, when the information became available as to the exact time the ships had left port. Perhaps even more enviable would have been Ashmole’s certainty that his position was fully integrated within the chain ...”

“... chapters illustrate ‘how the ideas of ancient auctores – Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Augustine, and the rest – flowed through the Middle Ages in many different channels: sermons and Bible commentaries, moral and political treatises, encyclopedias and lexicons, medical and astrological handbooks, didactic and courtly poetry, tapestries ...”

“... exactly could claim to have solved the ‘mystery of the Nile’, a mystery that had first gripped Ptolemy. Ancient Egyptian prosperity was built on the annual summer flooding of the river and the fertility produced by its silt. To be so heavily dependent on this miraculous annual event without knowing its ultimate source was a cause of unease for successive ...”

“... century, Edmond Halley examined records of medieval and ancient solar eclipses back to the time of Ptolemy. He discovered that when he used the position and trajectory of the Moon to determine retrospectively when solar eclipses should have occurred, the times calculated differed from the actual ones by up to an hour. Halley deduced that in the past the Moon ...”

“... three thousand years? As a matter of fact, we know that, latterly, they did try to adjust: under Ptolemy III, for example, leap years were officially introduced, but they proved unpopular. Any earlier adjustment, if it won acceptance, would have been enough to wreck the modern chronological calculations. There is another obstacle, though – the ...”

“... It starts with Greco-Roman culture, in particular the cartography of the Alexandrian scholar Ptolemy, who knew the world was a globe and thought the best way to project it was as a grid. On such a map, the vertical lines of longitude converge naturally at two poles (the choice to put north on top seems to have been purely a matter of custom). Like the ...”

“... is the great library at Alexandria, the Museion or ‘temple of the Muses’ established by Ptolemy I Soter around 300 BC, and expanded by his son. This had a director, a catalogue and a very large budget, together with the beginnings of a compulsory copyright act: any ship docking in Alexandria had its books impounded for copying. Almost fifteen ...”

“... didn’t prove that the universe was Copernican (as Kepler would soon show), but they did prove Ptolemy and the university professors wrong. The fixed points in Galileo’s life are firmly established: a move from Pisa to Padua in 1592, the telescopic discoveries and publication of the Sidereus Nuncius in 1609-10, the banning of Copernicus in 1616, the ...”

“... not – as one might imagine of such a daringly modish compilation – the moderns, but Pliny, Ptolemy and Cicero. Notwithstanding his partisanship on behalf of the Enlightenment, Pagden never resorts to caricature. But he does indulge in synecdoche, presenting a part of the phenomenon – perhaps, to be fair, the most significant part – as the ...”

“... it had become painfully evident to savants that the best minds of Antiquity – Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen – had erred. They tried to immunise themselves against further intellectual debacles by proceeding slowly and methodically, gathering up fragments of fact in preparation for a grand synthesis postponed to some remote future date. Kenny quotes ...”