“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pay and to return $250,000 to the Trust. It was a spectacularly extravagant decision to commission Richard Meier in 1984 to build a new Getty Center – including the chief museum, the Research Institute and the Conservation Center – as a cluster of buildings on a hilltop in Brentwood accessible only (for ordinary visitors and most staff) by a steep ...”

“... called The Mirror in Europe, Particularly in France. There are passing references to Shakespeare (Richard II’s famous mirror soliloquy) and there’s an excellent extended analysis of a passage in Rilke, as well as scattered references to other European writers; and many of the paintings are German or Dutch. But most of the literary sources are French, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sometimes images, but always ‘unclassifiable materials … that no one else would publish’. Richard Kostelanetz, elder statesman of the American avant-garde, called it ‘the most persistently experimental literary magazine to survive for more than a decade in America’. To bemused Ohians peeling it off their windscreens, this description might have ...”

“... three volumes of basic source material, the first two with Stanley Wertheim, another Crane scholar: The Correspondence of Stephen Crane (1988) and The Crane Log (1994), a 450-page chronology which imposes order on the spotty record of Crane’s life. Stephen Crane Remembered (2006), which includes 62 reminiscences of Crane from every stage of his ...”

“... becoming a legend. He decorated his tattered gown with jam tins. He was a terrific Classical scholar but neglected the set books ‘most scandalously’, as he said himself. Studying philosophy, he boasted of acknowledging no superior mind among his teachers. Against all the odds posed by his clearly superior abilities, he contrived to get second-class ...”

“... of King Alfred of Wessex in the ninth century termed ‘Christendom’. This now anonymous scholar had translated a four-century-old world history written in Latin by the Roman Christian writer Orosius. His audience of Anglo-Saxons were determined to unite themselves to the newly named society. The Catholic Church had gained official imperial status ...”

“... percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public attitudes than lives lived long and ...”

“... two biographies of Ellison which are useful in quite different ways. Five years ago, the young scholar Lawrence Jackson published Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius. It was in effect the first real biography, and not much noticed, though it was a compelling portrait. Jackson chose as his subject-matter only Ellison’s history up to the publication of ...”