“... which perhaps best exemplifies the qualities Caravaggio lacked is The Last Communion of St Jerome, which Domenichino began about a year after Caravaggio’s death and completed three years later, in 1614. For over two centuries it was one of the most admired and loved paintings in the world: today it attracts only ...”

“... The Marquis de Custine is best known for La Russie en 1839, an eloquent account of his travels across European Russia and of the horrors and absurdities of the Russian autocracy. Born in 1790, Custine lost his grandfather at the age of three and, a year later, his father: both were executed during the Jacobin Terror, although both had been sympathetic to the Revolution ...”

“... making the book seem like padding. Musicals that don’t manage this, like most of those by Jerome Kern or Andrew Lloyd Webber, end up as song cycles barely held together by text. When they do pull it off – Oklahoma!, Fiddler on the Roof, The Music Man – they can make for extraordinarily powerful theatrical ...”

“... and quickly created two visions of psychosexual implosion, Pillar of Fire and Undertow. In 1944, Jerome Robbins burst onto the scene with Fancy Free, a ballet about three sailors on shore leave; the score was by Leonard Bernstein and the two soon stormed Broadway with On the Town. The same year Martha Graham premiered a ...”

“... its commitment to sensual excitements, in liturgy and image and holy rapture, it has – and Saint Jerome to James Joyce stand at a rather crowded bar here as witnesses – hardly promoted the beauty or value of the flesh. That radiant body in heaven, Aquinas wrote, will be possessed of the ...”

“... In Nabokov’s witty and disarming ‘Ballad of Longwood Glen’, published in the New Yorker in 1957, shy, dreamy Art Longwood climbs a tree on a family picnic to retrieve his son’s ball – and carries on climbing: Up and up Art Longwood swarmed and shinned, And the leaves said yes to the questioning wind. What tiaras of gardens! What torrents of light! How accessible ether! How easy flight! His family circled the tree all day ...”

“... not claim to make the flesh creep, as James did, though he sometimes succeeds – as did J. K. Jerome in his comparable set of genre-parodies, Told after Supper, intended as jokes but haunted by those strange spirits who are ever ready to pounce upon a medium, however jocular he thinks himself. In the Thirties, Robertson ...”

“... of prelates, Arianism was accepted by both Eastern and Western bishops in 359. As St Jerome later sadly commented, ‘the whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian.’ In much the same way, Keith Joseph claimed a few years ago: ‘We are all monetarists now.’ Yet the adoption and apparent triumph ...”

“... fact about Byron: especially all the material in Leslie Marchand’s edition of the letters and Jerome McGann’s annotated edition of the poems. Thus loaded, it is interrogated on the grounds that the internal interactions of this data will create an artificially intelligent ‘Byron’ who can be conversed with about ...”

“... of Negroes’, and only last spring ‘kicked a man to death on a public street.’ That man was Jerome Van Wetter, Hillary’s cousin ‘once or twice removed’ (the family is notoriously primitive and inbred), and when Call’s disembowelled and half-skinned body is found one morning, attention immediately focuses on ...”

“... In June 1345, in the Chapter Library at Verona, Petrarch discovered a manuscript containing the letters written by Cicero to his friend Atticus (‘Ad Atticum’), his brother Quintus (‘Ad Quintum Fratrem’) and Caesar’s assassin, Marcus Brutus (‘Ad M. Brutum’). Lost for centuries, the letters enraptured Petrarch, providing him with a moment of first contact not unlike that of Howard Carter peering through the hole into Tutankhamun’s tomb and murmuring that he could see ‘wonderful things ...”

“... she climbs down into the blizzard, and Vronsky is waiting for her. Images of men reading (St Jerome snug in his study, say, or Rembrandt’s tender etching of Jan Six standing to catch the light at a window) don’t have the same equivocal eloquence: they don’t embody the same paradox of confinement and escape. Men ...”

“... on barley loans was 33 per cent for more than a thousand years. In 325 CE, just before Saints Jerome and Ambrose established Christian doctrine on usury, Constantine reconfirmed the maximum Roman rate of 12 per cent. When Locke was warning of the perils of low rates, England was debating whether to move from 6 per cent ...”

“... is not much concerned to argue with his opponents (Marilyn Butler, Marjorie Levinson, Alan Liu, Jerome McGann, David Simpson), and if he does it is often a sign that he has missed the point. When Liu claims that the category ‘nature’ is always constituted in terms of a politics, Bate replies that the limitation of ...”

“... or whatever) that produces the book. Revisionary bibliographers like Jerome McGann (who sees the text as an inherently collaborative production) and D.F. McKenzie (who has proposed a ‘sociology of the text’) come down firmly on Darnton’s side. From the prospectus, it looks very much as if ...”