“... way is through Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless; not handy for making out many miles upon.’Richard Holmes suspects that Tennyson was having a protracted nervous breakdown, whose immediate causes were not hard to discern. He had suspended his unofficial engagement to Emily Sellwood in the summer of 1840 after her father had finally forbidden the ...”

“... of the world’s most important Islamic movements. They trace their origins not to an individual scholar but to a madrasa established in 1866 in the town of Deoband, an hour’s drive north of Delhi, and now one of the world’s most influential seats of Islamic learning. The version of Islam it teaches is in many ways similar to Wahhabism – both movements ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and his colleagues understood that books and reading have a history. They made it possible for the scholar-adventurers of the 20th century, as Richard Altick called the manuscript hunters and bibliographers who populated the libraries created by Gigante’s protagonists, to discover long-lost manuscripts and books and devise ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fall’, and she was not alone in finding in him an innocence of the world that lay about him.As Richard Holmes’s 1974 biography showed with such intelligence and affection, Shelley was fully aware of his reputation for being away with the fairies and became brilliantly adept at playing along with it, often to seductive effect; but it wasn’t just an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with a group of Ruskin students in 1969, and one of them, Alun Howkins (later a distinguished scholar of the rural poor), introduced him to his first interviewees, at a time when oral history was regarded with suspicion by many academic historians.Headington Quarry is now a residential suburb of Oxford but was originally an ‘open village’ – not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”