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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be possible.By the end of the decade, Bunche was the best-travelled and most knowledgeable Black scholar of Africa in the US; it’s our loss that, as other commitments crowded in, he wrote up so little of his research. Unsurprisingly, since he had concluded that Black advancement in America could only come as a result of expanding social-democratic ...”

“... and politically suspect. Weber is out of fashion, and for every area of disenchantment there is a scholar to tell you that it wasn’t that simple, that the world remained enchanted. Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic is still a delight to read, but the distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘magic’ has only become harder to sustain in the ...”

“... of the poetry have followed this tendency: it is not rare now for critics like, for instance, Richard Holmes in his agreeable volumes of biography, to find Coleridge’s crown as a poet among the ‘Conversation Poems’ – quietly meditative post-Cowper colloquial writing such as ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, and ‘Frost at ...”

“... in 1987. O’Brien’s claim to fame, put somewhat cartoonishly, is that she was the first major scholar to ‘out’ Cather – to take up the issue of the novelist’s sexuality (long-rumoured to be lesbian) and relate it directly to her creative enterprise. Though deeply closeted, Cather was patently homosexual, O’Brien argued, and her secret ...”

“... title conveyed Picasso’s intention accurately. When Georges Salles – old friend of Picasso, scholar of Asian art, by 1958 head of the French museum establishment – called the scene ‘La chute d’Icare’ in a speech at the painting’s installation in Paris a few months later, it was unclear to his audience if he was acting with Picasso’s ...”

“... biographical evidence asks to be read in terms of what another son of the Yorkshire working class, Richard Hoggart, wrote about ‘the scholarship boy’, who goes on to lead an ‘apparently normal life, but never without an underlying sense of some unease’. Butterfield worked ferociously hard all his life, driven by who knows what mixture of ambition, duty ...”

“... probably dates back to around 600 years aa; fabulous and implausible, it has been described by one scholar as Cecil B. De Mille’s Gospel of Alexander. Behind the frontmen of the Roman era lies a rich and various corpus of lost texts written by men who lived in the time of Alexander or knew someone who had. Soon after the King’s death, little tracts ...”

“... people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours.’ Of his friend the dotty scholar George Dyer: ‘With long poring, he is grown almost into a book. He stood as passive as one by the side of the old shelves. I longed to new coat him in russia, and assign him to his place.’ In a marvellous vignette, Lamb makes a ‘sentiment’ – an ...”