“... of that event the detachment and disenchantment necessary to shatter accepted orthodoxies. Thus Richard Cobb’s vivid writings have shown how little the Revolution affected many of the poorest and most peripheral Frenchmen. More subversive still, it was another British scholar, Alfred Cobban, who demolished the ...”

“... James Johnstoun. Caroline editions of the work include a finale composed by the Catholic Irishman, Richard Bellings, who rose to prominence in the Royalist confederation and wrote a history of its affairs. The milieu of Ben Jonson’s friend, William Drummond of Hawthornden, was far from exclusively Scottish. Henry Vaughan’s religious poetry emerged from a ...”

“... the same time – often to dramatic effect; but also a series of stunning temporary exhibitions (Richard III, Samuel Pepys, Cecil Beaton’s photographs) which had ‘the whole of London agog’ and queues of people round Trafalgar Square. These ‘Diaries’ – in fact, partly reworked versions of a variety of ‘jottings’ and more crafted ...”

“... with the New York establishment. It is also true, as Davis and his defenders point out, that no scholar’s footnotes could withstand unscathed the attention to which Westwater and others (now including the Los Angeles Times) have subjected them. Davis has worked for years as an impoverished independent scholar, with ...”

“... personality in various interludes and ‘interchapters’. He is, he admits, no Holmesian (Richard, not Sherlock) ‘pursuer’ of his subject. But he offers a vivid account of a visit he made to Kensal Green Cemetery as he began work on his biography. It was December (the month in which the novelist died): Thackeray’s grave on the south side, where ...”

“... a wish to ‘satisfy specialists’ as well, as his book will certainly do. He is an Australian scholar who began his acquaintance with India twenty years ago as a teacher of English at Chandigarh. He ‘relies heavily’ on Indian newspapers and periodicals, about whose proliferation in the Punjab, in the vernacular as well as in English, he has much to ...”

“... Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole enterprise, I do think, is compromised by those gestures towards ‘the English Spirit’, ‘the making of a tradition’ etc. (They come thickest, it is true, in the ...”

“... of the origin of visual art and of the function of its different forms, and was the inspiration of Richard Payne Knight’s Discourse on the Worship of Priapus. Like Haskell, he had the storyteller’s ability to ‘captivate’ his audience, and nothing could be more appropriate, in Haskell’s account of the life and adventures of this picaresque ...”

“... a Soviet spy, and with her support, Kuczynski was recruited by Moscow and received a visit from Richard Sorge, a charismatic German described by Macintyre as ‘a strange mixture of bibliophile and brawler, pedantic scholar and hard-nosed functionary … a dissolute warrior-priest’.* The Hamburger home became a ...”

“... because it’s been notably well covered in recent and not so recent historiography. The late Richard Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages presented an integrated vision of the 11th and 12th centuries that has worn remarkably well. Given Jordan’s own research into the reign of Louis IX and the 13th-century Crusades, it comes as no surprise to find ...”

“... Syriac and Arabic tongues (in which those who confer with him familiarly affirm that he is no mean scholar) and of the humanities; also he will correct loyally, carefully and faithfully whatever is entrusted to him, without ever seeking to parade his learning or show off before others, for he is very retiring and most assiduous at the tasks assigned to ...”

“... far beyond death’s immediate ‘scattering of breath’. But for me – I take my cue from a scholar who discusses this material, Eugene Wang – the figures whose presence on the banner goes on attracting my attention are a handful of dead individuals setting out on the journey, along the very first yards of the dragon-tail way. ‘Dishevelled’, Wang ...”

“... credit for seeing Shakespeare’s Sonnets into print in 1609, a ‘possibility that … no scholar has ever considered’ – which will come as a surprise to longtime LRB readers who remember Barbara Everett’s similar argument in these pages.* Greer’s task in this ambitious, brilliant and too often misguided biography is to bring Ann Hathaway to ...”

“... When Richard Rorty died last year, the New York Times called him ‘one of the world’s most influential contemporary thinkers’. Few philosophers would accept this assessment. Rorty was widely read and admired by many, he had a good nose for a controversy and was impressive in oral debate. But his influence on philosophy has, so far, been minimal: Rorty’s unconvincing attempts to show that traditional philosophy has had its day have largely been ignored by philosophers ...”

“... He had painstakingly learned how to use the figures of rhetoric to shape sentences when he was a scholar at St Paul’s and later at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The diary allows him to loosen the hold of formal rhetorical structure on his prose (many of his official letters display the pomposity which can come of lamplight and rhetorical effort) while ...”