“... the mystery and miracle of his existence. In his excellent book on the Russian Revolutionary novel Richard Freeborn discusses the many forerunners of Dr Zhivago, and implies, what is certainly the case, that the novels which had sought to come to terms with the new world of the Revolution – Fedin’s Cities and Years, Veresaev’s The Deadlock, Bulgakov’s ...”

“... to be written of the vast lurch into modernity of the criminal justice process. The American scholar John Langbein traces its narrative and procedural dimensions, basing himself extensively on the Old Bailey sessions papers, a rich and only recently mined resource, but also on less obvious sources such as the Post Office solicitors’ archives at Mount ...”

“... poem says.’ ‘This is not to say,’ he adds, ‘that the same man may not be both historical scholar and critic,’ but such a man would be exercising two talents at discrete times rather than combining them in ways that respected the integrity of each. The conclusion (unhappy for many) is that the effects of one’s actions will always be confined to ...”

“... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care … She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written ...”

“... so often serves to expose the outmoded limitations of his models. Spenser had demanded of the scholar Gabriel Harvey, ‘Why a Gods name may not we, as else the Greekes, have the kingdome of our own language,’ and if English writers from the 1580s onwards can be seen, as Richard Helgerson argued in Forms of Nationhood ...”

“... historical and autobiographical questions and then hares off to tackle the former. This means that Richard Evans had an untilled field before him. Based on unrestricted access to Hobsbawm’s personal archive, this is one of those doorstopper biographies that can get published in Britain even when the subject is a historian. It clocks in at 662 pages of text ...”

“... is to the investigation of such demonic remedies that the groundbreaking work of Louise Noble and Richard Sugg is devoted. The belief that a wide range of maladies could be cured by the consumption of human remains – principally in the form of so-called ‘mummy’ – persisted in Europe for at least six centuries. Although the administration of such ...”

“... subject to delays. The obscure origins of the University are carefully reconstructed. In Sir Richard Southern’s distinction, Oxford was not ‘created’ – it ‘emerged’. The contributors explain the significance of its geographical location and its importance as a centre of legal activity. They discuss how it separated from the town and the ...”

“... have tended to feel either hagiographic or hostile. The famous early masterpiece of debunking was Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version, published in 1968 and a product of that anti-establishment end-of-decade. Loveable Uncle Walt had been dead for less than two years. Schickel’s work is still superbly readable and shrewd even when it is deeply unfair; it ...”

“... the East’ goes back to the 1940s, and was constantly reinforced by Robert Scalapino, a Cold War scholar who came to prominence in the late 1950s. North Korea was indeed Stalinist in its state-run industrialisation drive, and modelled its administration and much of its system on Stalin’s Russia – but so did every other Communist regime in the ...”

“... by his descendants that the facts were unknown outside the family until 1916, when the Princeton scholar George McLean Harper broke the news.) Quite what part Wordsworth otherwise took in these violent times is obscure, but in old age he told an inquirer that he was ‘pretty hot in it’, and his response to revolutionary atrocity in the poem is strikingly ...”

“... a museum for the wali’s personal collection, the Antiqakhana, overseen by the influential scholar and reformer Rifa’a al-Tahtawi. Educated at al-Azhar and in Paris, al-Tahtawi was influential in presenting the country’s ancient history in textbooks used by generations of 19th-century Egyptian children (he is also one of the few Egyptians mentioned ...”

“... us flew out together, Air India, first class: Michael Foot, Jean Floud, William Radice, with Sir Richard Attenborough in pursuit. It was my pleasure to travel with my old friend and newly-minted Dame, Iris Murdoch. I’ve never travelled first before, and well! Cocktails, champagne, caviar, lobster ... Young Dame Iris, by the way, took all as her customary ...”

“... and the Vision of Darkness. At some point around 1600, when the play was still new, the Cambridge scholar Gabriel Harvey was already noting (in a blank space at the end of his copy of Chaucer) that Shakespeare’s Lucrece ‘and his tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark have it in them, to please the wiser sort’. While the claim on the title page of the ...”

“... Richard Holmes published Shelley: The Pursuit in 1974. More than a decade later, in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), he recalled how obsessive his engagement gradually became, not just with Shelley, but with that whole group of English expatriates associated with him, as it moved from Geneva through Italy – Bagni di Lucca, Este, Venice, Rome, Naples, Ravenna, Pisa – shedding some members and adding others, before finally disintegrating when Shelley and Edward Williams were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822 ...”