“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with delight’. The Dutch Orientalist Reinhardt Dozy, who in the 1840s was the first European scholar to read the Arabic sources, described Rodrigo as ‘only concerned by the pay he would get and the pillaging … he violated and destroyed many churches,’ and concluded that ‘this man without faith or law’ was ‘more Muslim than ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... same height and weight as Byrne in order to maintain verisimilitude’.In his 1959 biography, Richard Ellmann reported that Joyce ‘often agreed with Vico that “imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered.”’ Ellmann also quotes Joyce’s remark to Frank Budgen: ‘Imagination is memory.’ Budgen, whom Joyce met in Zurich in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which broods on conversion as the antidote to secular inanition, made its narrator a Huysmans scholar whose special study is En Route.Decadence lost some of its savour across the Channel. McDonagh is impressed with the upwardly mobile John Gray, who escaped the Woolwich Arsenal to become a civil servant and poet before he converted and took ordination at ...”

“... of formal policy-maker have come to the fore. There are the passive functionaries – men like Richard Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East; he travels here and there but because he is a career Arabist his influence is nil. More ominous are the ideological over-achievers, typified by Richard Perle in ...”

“... but also of opinion, of trying to read the characters of the dead. I am not a 19th-century scholar, a Brontë expert, a Brontë fan even. A year ago, I was not interested in Charlotte, or her mysterious sisters or feckless brother, or their eccentric father, and I was certainly not interested in her charming publisher or her upright critics. I was not ...”