“... as well he might, for as he points out, the manuscript conjoins three of the most brilliant and lively-minded queens of the era: Marguerite of Navarre was the compiler of The Heptameron, a collection of secular tales, as well as a Reformist sympathiser, friend of Calvin and patron of independent scholars; Catherine Parr also composed religious ...”

“... life. Even during the age of liberal nationalism after the First World War, when it had a lively parliamentary life, popular sovereignty was sharply curtailed by British power. Since the 1952 coup which brought Nasser to power, it has been ruled by military dictatorship, although the establishment of multi-party politics in the late 1970s brought a ...”

“... the Tungus. The Rev. George Stanley Faber, a preacher at Oxford in the early 19th century, added Adam, Noah, the patriarch Enoch, Janus, Hercules and the Cyclops to the list. Moreover, he argued, since ‘Buddha and Woden are the same deity … the theology of the Gothic and Saxon tribes was a modification of Buddhism’. Mindfulness, no doubt, spurred on by ...”

“... a story that Duncan has told in the collection of articles on ‘book parts’ that he edited with Adam Smyth. Making them has remained one of the print professional’s crafts, as Virginia Woolf learned to her displeasure when she wore her eyes out compiling them. (Pulling together an index from a floor littered with little squares of paper wasn’t as ...”

“... of small-time papers, was doing the same thing in the opposite way, among corpses rather than lively bodies. But Whitman, who took to Poe at once and liked his work, had a dark side too, and a sensuous passion for the dead and their graves, for night as the mother, and for oblivion. When his friend Horace Traubel, who also wanted to be his ...”

“... and the new kabbalistic ideas coming from the school of Isaac Luria in Palestine. John Freely’s lively book is basically a retelling of Scholem’s story enriched by the author’s knowledge of the Ottoman background. His one significant addition to Scholem is his suggestion as to where Sabbatai might be buried. Freely has omitted all of Scholem’s ...”

“... penchant for academic squabbling and a string of unconventional marriages. But three biographers? Adam Sisman came first, publishing a lively and well-written study in 1994. Although the scholarly achievements and disappointments were chronicled, Taylor’s personality and public engagements – with the Communist Party ...”

“... several books. He knows the history of Milton criticism as well as anyone, and treats it as a lively conversation across three centuries, in which Dryden and Addison, Blake and Shelley, Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye trade insights with contemporary critics. Wittreich wears great learning lightly, and provides a salutary reminder that there is much worth ...”

“... neglected his finances; perhaps Pushkin was thinking of him when he wrote that Onegin had read his Adam Smith – unlike his father, who ‘could not understand him,/and mortgaged his lands’. Pushkin’s father was dilettantish and literary; Pushkin’s uncle, Vasily, was an established though mediocre poet, most remarkable, it seems, for his last ...”

“... that became the new and true elixir. The poets whom Sartre, referring to Villiers de l’Isle Adam and his contemporaries, called ‘Knights of Nothingness’, the kind of poets who had withdrawn into ivory towers, suddenly became guardians of the living flame. While the waves of cant washed over his homeland, it was this solitary poet and not the peasant ...”

“... was a comedian who did a Bristolian version of the Fall of Man. In the Garden of Eden, God says to Adam: ‘Adam, you bin eating them apples?’ ‘I neverrr,’ Adam replies. God says: ‘What are all them bloody apple cores doing on the ground then?’‘I neverrr’ is the original ...”

“... their first meeting in November 1868, Nietzsche wrote of his exhilaration at this ‘fabulously lively and fiery man, who speaks very rapidly, [and] is very funny’. For his part, Wagner, then aged 55, seems to have been rejuvenated by his new interlocutor, writing to Nietzsche in 1872: ‘You are, aside from my wife, the one prize I have received in ...”

“... into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, in 1764, the year in which he succeeded Adam Smith in the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow. At 70 he retired to prepare his lectures for publication. They appeared as the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man and the Essays on the Active Powers of Man, in 1785 and 1788 respectively.Reid had ...”

“... colossally successful film. Michelangelo’s renowned image of God making finger contact with Adam (known to viewers of London Weekend Television through the surrogate emblem of Melvyn Bragg conducting the live electricity of the Arts) has been hijacked for the dust-cover of this generic hybrid. Let us pause before the engaging image of the outstretched ...”

“... pentiti, and the role they have played, particularly in the Mafia trials, has long been a lively one in Italy. A number of the charges against Andreotti, for example, are based on statements taken from pentiti. Italian law is clear: charges laid by pentiti must be corroborated independently. Marino, however, was confused about the colour of the car ...”