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“... myopia from posterity, a spectrum of close to long-lookers can be drawn up: Hindenburg (+4.5D), Edward Gibbon (+4.37D), Martin Luther (+3.0D), Bismarck (−3.0D), Schopenhauer (−3.5D), Schubert (−3.75D), Beethoven (−4.0D), Gregor Mendel (−4.5D), Marie Antoinette (−4.0D), Goethe (−6.0D). The figures represent dioptres, which express the ...”

“... habits of early 20th-century London. The paper’s first lead review was of More Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, done by Augustine Birrell, a barrister, a Liberal MP, and the author of a volume of essays entitled Obiter Dicta. The first poem was by Harold Begbie. It was an anthem for Empire, and May succinctly describes it as ‘rather an absurd ...”

“... most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’. Gibbon considered them to be an expression of ‘savage fanaticism’. In a History of the Crusades (1820), one of the earliest studies devoted specifically to the topic, Charles Mills deplored the medieval fanaticism and popery. In The Mameluke or Slave Dynasty ...”

“... the solid core both of Portraits in Miniature and of the present volume. These studies of Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude and Creighton encapsulate Strachey’s own historical method both in theory and in practice. He defined the three qualities that make a historian as ‘a capacity for absorbing facts, a capacity for stating them, and a point of ...”

“... to see six chickens he tended – G.L. Dickinson, E.J. Dent, Siegfried Sassoon, Forrest Reid and Edward Carpenter. Interesting, too, when they involve places, travels, holidaying. Forster had what sounds like a very long holiday, beginning in October 1901, with his mother in Italy. Five months in Germany in 1905 didn’t leave a permanent impression. But the ...”

“... in 18th-century England revealed an intellectual regime far less torpid than that described by Gibbon (about whom Porter has also published an elegant and penetrating study). Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World convincingly exposes the canard that 18th-century England missed out. Porter here provides a convincing master narrative of ...”

“... lending libraries, which did not then exist in the Christian West. A key figure here was Edward Pococke (1604-91). In the 1630s he worked as the chaplain to the English Levant Company in Aleppo, where he studied with local Muslim scholars and collected manuscripts; on his return, Laud appointed him the first professor of Arabic at Oxford. His ...”

“... Cameron of Lochiel, whose decision, against his better judgment, to come out for Prince Charles Edward Stuart in 1745 won the clans for the Pretender and doomed the ancient culture of the Highlands to extinction. ‘That gentleman, whose rent never exceeded five hundred pounds a year, carried, in 1745, eight hundred of his own people into the rebellion with ...”

“... partisan. Sumption stands in a long tradition of historiography that claims the high moral ground: Gibbon, Stubbs and Acton (the ‘magistrate of history’ and advocate of history as a ‘hanging judge’) would no doubt have approved. Sumption treats the period as one of French civil war as much as war between England and France. It witnessed the ...”

“... Asked​ in an exam at the age of 16 whether kings should be elected, the future Edward VII answered: ‘It is better than hereditary right because you have more chance of having a good sovereign, if it goes by hereditary right if you have a bad or weak sovereign, you cannot prevent him reigning.’ By Bertie’s feeble standards, this was a flash of insight ...”

“... but frequently more discursive than some might think the occasion requires, as when the late Edward Said is chastised at length for his errant opinion of A Passage to India. Forster’s devotees, a party that includes the present editor, are clearly unwilling to treat the paralipomena of an admired author as undeserving of the fullest canonical ...”

“... are famous) and Naples (Sir William Hamilton). There were political refugees, notably Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, and his brother, the Cardinal Duke of York (who was born in Rome and left only once to go to Paris in 1745 and prepare to go to England should the rebellion be successful). Many Jacobites had followed them and some may have ...”

“... a Sorrow the loss of them was capable of occasioning’. Hovering uneasily in the wings is one Edward Waitfort, a cautious if persistent lover who delivers ‘insolent’ lectures on her conduct and whom the widow torments by repeatedly rejecting him for other candidates. Lady Mary’s authorship of the piece – it was written in 1714 – was not made ...”

“... had induced a more temperate climate – a view shared by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Gibbon read meteorological reports from the colonies and drew a parallel between 18th-century Canada and ancient Germany, where, before the bogs were drained, forests cleared and the soil exposed to the warming effects of the sun, the climate had been equally ...”

“... of 1965, which presented both Latin and English texts along with magisterial introductions by Edward Surtz and J.H. Hexter. For Surtz (a Jesuit), More was very much Saint Thomas; for Hexter (a Whig), he was more clearly Sir Thomas, and their rival interpretations have challenged future scholars to find the truth behind the gangly hybrid of the library ...”