“... 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 ...”

“... and the Adelphi. The destruction of the Adelphi was deemed ‘inevitable’ by the William Morris scholar John Drinkwater, as though to oppose it would be derisive of the common mood. Robert Byron, less precious than usual, regretted that ‘according to official and ecclesiastical standards … a bit of the old Roman wall is of more importance than Nash’s ...”

“... remarkable petulance, even (or especially) from Americans who have had long experience in Korea. Richard Allen, a Republican point man on Korean affairs, wrote in the Times that Roh Moo Hyun’s election made for ‘a troubling shift’ in US relations with the ROK. Korean leaders, he said, had now ‘stepped into the neutral zone’; indeed, he added, they ...”

“... figurehead: he had little in the way of military experience and fancied himself a Platonist and scholar. Displaying unexpected energies, however, he imprisoned Amalasuntha and had her quietly murdered. Justinian pounced, claiming to be defending dynastic legitimacy. His great general Belisarius, fresh from African victories, routed the Gothic garrisons in ...”

“... professional credentials – he charmingly quotes the equally charming observation of the Shelley scholar G.M. Matthews: ‘I do not think you err on the side of pedantry.’ The readership he aims at seems to be not so much the full-time, paid-up student of literature as the general reader or intelligent sixth-former – who may in fact already know enough ...”

“... Their leaders promised not to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms of a growing pie.’ That is why they ...”

“... Fukuyama has arrived at a similar conclusion, and among fictional characters, the heroine of Richard Condon’s novel The Final Addiction. Like them, Fisher insists that the ingenuity of global capitalism now flows into all the interstices of out lives, and that, with its sublime new products, it will revolutionise all our former assumptions. He declares ...”