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“... characters who are weak, stupid, or morally defective’. But, with the cautious candour of a true scholar, Tytler admits that some brief, one-epithet descriptions of separate features may well be the legacy of the novelists’ predecessors, and that ‘much 19th-century literary portraiture, particularly general facial description, seems to be little more ...”

“... scholarly integrity. Now, just short of a century after Collier’s death, an energetic American scholar has risen to clear his name. Fortune and Men’s Eyes is the studiously even-handed biography of an ambiguous and not especially likeable man who, Ganzel thinks, was convicted of a crime he did not commit. It is also, in part, an absorbing exercise in ...”

“... the staple teaching of art history, but it is the belief that has animated the lifework of a great scholar, born in ...”

“... of God. The rabbis banished him from Smyrna, and not long afterwards Nathan of Gaza, a kabbalistic scholar who had got to know him, announced that Sabbatai was indeed the expected messiah. By the end of 1665, Sabbatai was declaring that, as the messiah, he was no longer bound by Jewish ritual and laws; he changed a fast day into a feast on the grounds that ...”

“... and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (2014), is the first to make full use of them. He is a careful scholar, and this is an engrossing, often exciting and sometimes moving book. Much of the story is well known, at least in outline, and Kertzer’s narrative doesn’t alter the basic details, let alone settle the debate. But on a number of issues, the new ...”

“... restlessness in After Hours with P.G. Wodehouse. Readers of this journal may recall a Diary by Richard Usborne (LRB, 4 October 1984) in which a determined investigation into the origins of Wodehouse’s use of ‘exquisite Tanagra figurine’ led to an evocation of the days when cut-price Boeotian coroplasts cluttered the shops of St Tropez. That Diary is ...”

“... from what window Hamilton Rowan had thrown his hat on the haha’. The scholar in his understandable eagerness not to miss a trick has made much ado about little or nothing. The example is, indeed, trivial, but it illustrates a danger that too often mars an over-conscientious book. It would be tedious to give many other examples of ...”

“... This book​ is almost parodically characteristic of Robert Macfarlane’s work. He is a scholar of place – of terrain, terroir, the land – and at times references, sources and citations have bulked uncomfortably large in his writing. Certainly he frequents the countryside at close quarters and often strenuously ...”

“... publish biographies of the poet Persius that completely contradict each other. An Italian scholar publishes an article definitively proving that the Englishman was correct, but World War One has broken out and there is no way for the Englishman to find out if the German has admitted defeat. The German dies in the war. Years later, the Englishman still ...”

“... death, her collaborator on the 1965 volume, Anna Saakiants, became the official Tsvetaeva scholar in the Soviet Union. In 1980, she brought out a two-volume selection of Tsvetaeva’s verse, prose and drama. In the Seventies, however, a pléiade of capable and dedicated younger Tsvetaeva scholars emerged in the USSR – among them, Lev ...”

“... Woolf was surprised that HGW’s ‘typewritten sheets’ were read by ‘a shaggy, shabby old scholar’, T.E. Page. In 1981, Niall Rudd wrote a short biography of the scholar and controversialist, who taught classics at Charterhouse, was once seen by Osbert Lancaster accompanying Lady Asquith down Bond St, and died a ...”

“... the treason trials themselves and ‘the invention of modern treason’. Barrell, a literary scholar and art historian known for putting politics back into painting, landscape and poetry, shows himself to be a first-class historian. The archival sources and range of contemporary printed sources on which he bases his study are impressive. In addition, his ...”

“... The Darwin scholar, John Greene, once summarised the Darwinian revolution as the triumph of a dynamic and non-teleological structuring of nature over static, teological systems: the triumph of chance and change over design and permanence, the triumph of objectivity in the life sciences, of secularism and naturalism over clericalism and the supernatural ...”

“... say I was moving to Spitzbergen. The central figure in Harrison’s book about millenarianism is Richard Brothers, a late 18th-century reader of signs who believed he was destined to lead the Jews back to the Holy Land (‘sorting out the Jews is often a precondition of the millennium,’ Frank noted in passing). ‘Perhaps the value of knowing about such ...”

“... up a large, gilt-framed cibachrome which Kingsley hangs close to a 1649 portrait of a Dutch female scholar. Simply through her choice of image, Sulter seems to have said: this skin of mine has a sensual allure that is all of a piece with my self-command; I know what I’m about, just as Jan Lievens’s sitter did. But Sulter’s rhetoric of sensuality butts ...”