“... 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 ...”

“... year his blind daughter, Mary, was born – and suffered from a series of nervous illnesses which Richard Greaves unhelpfully approaches by means of psychiatric theory and William Styron’s compelling account of his own severe depression. In 1650 Bunyan had heard three or four women discussing religion: they were, he said, ‘far above out of my ...”

“... exporting of equipment, technologies of torture and bad lieutenants. To take one instance, Richard Zuley, a specialist at Guantánamo, had become reassuringly ruthless while working for a Chicago police unit that for decades interrogated predominantly African-Americans at so-called black sites. It’s only now, with a white supremacist ensconced in the ...”

“... and the content is the more approved the more it portrays the larger conflicts of society,’ Richard Humphrey wrote in The Historical Novel as Philosophy of History (1986); and since the size of the conflicts in history or society is assessed by the critic who assesses them in literature, and according to the same criteria, the argument is circular. An ...”

“... of his story, ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ (1927), are dispatched: ‘He was not a great scholar: the usual public school equipment.’ But Lawrence is most appealing when he is both satirical and aware of his own absurdity. Kinkead-Weekes reports that when Lawrence and Frieda arrived in Turin, in 1919, they stayed a night at the house of an ...”

“... development of later 17th-century drama. Powell’s is a most informative book, essential for any scholar or director at work on a Restoration play, but it scarcely has the stature of Norbrook’s study. Norbrook identifies a radical political tradition running through Renaissance literature, from More’s Utopia, through the ‘gospelling’ poets of the ...”

“... were both together in College at Eton and treated them therefore as equals; Bradshaw, a formidable scholar, was at home most evenings in his rooms to anyone who cared to call. But towards the end of the century a new type of bachelor don emerged. They were singularly appreciative of masculine beauty and did not hesitate to seek out and make friends with ...”

“... theology was basically inimical to scientific inquiry’: yet John Herschel, Charles Lyell, Richard Owen, Alfred Wallace and many other men of science pursued their scientific work in the conviction that there was real theological grandeur in the immensity and intricate designs of a scientifically-perceived creation. She notes that the period of natural ...”

“... He does not give the impression of being a voracious, catholic reader – a disability in a scholar whose subject is, at least in principle, everybody’s culture. The boy from Abergavenny Grammar School never sounds like the type of Welsh autodidact who emerged from the Mechanics Institutes, or – as my own father remembered his fellow workers in the ...”

“... posture. One of the first people to register the dangers of this system was the constitutional scholar Edward Samuel Corwin. In a series of lectures delivered at the University of Michigan in 1946 (later published as Total War and the Constitution), Corwin argued that the American state had been irreversibly altered by the dramatic expansion of executive ...”

“... is, frankly, crap, and Boisard will only touch the stuff because he values his reputation as a scholar and a gentleman: ‘As one who loves distinctive and individual cheeses, I rarely eat supermarket Camembert. Indeed, I have done so for only two reasons: first, when served some as a guest, I have eaten it out of politeness; second, when working on this ...”

“... hung in a rich man’s home. An early Botticelli showing a magnificently dressed Madonna supports Richard Goldthwaite’s thesis in Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy 1300-1600 that painters deliberately stimulated demand for devotional images by making changes in iconography and painting style. In theory bought to enhance the quality of prayer, such ...”

“... by the Azerbaijani template of clan violence and killing recently put forward by the German scholar Jörg Baberowski, but it’s something of a jump to extend this to Georgians and Armenians. Of course, it is too much to expect Montefiore to have become an expert on the Caucasus for the purpose of this book, and the significance of the Caucasus ...”