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“... 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 ...”

“... could have helped discredit a cause larger than himself in much the same way as the wretched Richard Gott recently managed, on a smaller scale, to do), waited until 1982 to publish his book After Long Silence. It told the usual story: the high excitement of the Thirties; the precedence given in Cambridge circles to young men of background and pelf who ...”

“... Jeremy Prynne what he thought of Captain Beefheart, he said he thought he sounded like Little Richard.’ Poodle Play is the Cambridge Poetry Festival on steroids. The exoskeleton recalls the papers delivered from the platform on that Saturday afternoon in King’s: selections from the Frankfurt School, carried aloft like placards in a Brecht play, moral ...”

“... monster, lionised by London hostesses as a man who did savage things in exotic lands, like Sir Richard Burton, later in the century. But that would be too absurd. ‘The proposed victim looked so thoroughly capable of enjoying life (if he could only get to the other side of the river) that I thought it would be hard for him to die, merely in order to give ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... According to Shahak – a survivor of Belsen, a former professor of chemistry in Jerusalem, a fine scholar and Israel’s foremost defender of human rights – the Talmud, which is more important for the Orthodox than the Old Testament, is bitterly offensive about Jesus in particular and Christians in general. Jerusalem remained a Christian city for some three ...”

“... was always unwilling to give ground and could sometimes be evasive. René Wellek, a Czech-American scholar and a historian of criticism, once politely challenged him to state the theoretical basis of his criticism. Leavis speedily and rather aggressively replied that nothing of the sort was needed, his criteria and his method were incorporated in what he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for lacking any sense of history. Collingwood illustrated his point with a tale about a scholar who insisted on translating the Greek word τριήρης as ‘steamship’ and, on being told that a trireme is nothing like a steamship, replied that this just showed the Greeks were ‘terribly muddle-headed’. MacIntyre cited the story in his first ...”

“... than others, on the books he wishes he’d written. The first section is on the Cambridge scholar and scientist Joseph Needham, microbiologist and expert on China, a man who fascinates Steiner and whom he wanted to write about in Frank Kermode’s Modern Masters series, published in the 1970s. Steiner had first seen Needham at a protest meeting ...”

“... Man Out of His Humour; Humfrey King, the poetic tobacconist; the barber-surgeons Tom Tooley and Richard Lichfield; the tavern joker John Stone. These loquacious oddballs found a small economic niche as ad hoc entertainers; they are haunters of St Paul’s Churchyard and the Inns of Court, of revels and convivia. We have no first-hand record of a Coryate ...”

“... Kevin Phillips, the author of American Dynasty, has given the association some thought: Biblical scholar Bruce Lincoln’s line-by-line analysis of Bush’s 7 October 2001 address to the nation announcing the US attack on Afghanistan identified a half dozen veiled borrowings from the Book of Revelation, Isaiah, Job, Matthew and Jeremiah. He concluded that ...”