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“... in England. Early in his career, after a stint as tutor to the son of the preacher and scholar Edward Stillingfleet, he intervened in the so-called Battle of the Books. This was, roughly speaking, an argument between the ‘ancients’, who claimed that ‘the oldest Books we have are still in their kind the best’, and the ‘moderns’, who thought that ...”

“... Time in 1948: I did. (Heavy flak fell not on Hamish, but on me, for promoting MacDiarmid, Grassic Gibbon, Sorley MacLean, all then on Communist Party lists of the damned.) Meanwhile, a quieter, more bookish poetry proceeded. For fifty years following Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica, Henderson was constantly asked what poems – which is to say, what ...”

“... Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was Thomas Rymer, not Edward; it was in the ruins of the Capitol, not the Colosseum, that Gibbon conceived the idea of the Decline and Fall; and Rothesay is not an island. It would be wrong, however, to allow pedantic irritation to mar one’s ...”

“... with his specialised study English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (1965), followed by his recent excellent short general book in Oxford’s Past Masters series. For a general assessment that is longer and fuller than McConica’s, but equally soundly based, up-to-date and accessible, there are two new books, both ...”

“... for the publication of two key works: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon praised Smith’s book as ‘the most profound and systematic treatise on the great objects of trade and revenue which had ever been published ...”

“... among the most significant of his life’. The long afternoons spent in Bangalore immersed in Gibbon and Macaulay formed his mind and shaped his style; the self-promoting war journalism made his name, boosted his bank balance and launched him into Parliament. Rather surprisingly for a leading military historian, Keegan does not really develop the martial ...”

“... special’, he explained). Higher-end bookshops offered incunabula and Aldines, first editions of Gibbon and Austen to discriminating buyers who had real money.If you didn’t, you could explore the riches available in public collections. New York Public Library branches were stuffed with new fiction and old treasures, which anyone could borrow or ...”

“... Revolution, an event that none of the ‘wisest philosophes’ – Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Gibbon, Hume – could have predicted. Our golden age of criticism exists in the uneasy calm before a storm that our dullest philosophers dismiss as too overwhelmingly obvious to discuss, much less predict. One strategy is offered by the journal ...”

“... through French literature then doubled back to the English Romantics. He read Cicero and Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and T.E. Lawrence, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf – this is just a small ...”

“... as Balfour, Asquith and, of course, Gladstone, as well as taking on Victoria (as co-author) and Edward VII. There have also been several largely unsung heroes and heroines among the in-house researchers, such as Anita McConnell, who wrote or revised almost 600 entries, chiefly on inventors and lesser scientists. Nonetheless, it is indisputable that the ODNB ...”