“... the age of 23, during a year spent as assistant master at Reading School under another Jersey man, Richard Valpy. Some months afterwards he took Holy Orders, and, still later, he obtained his BA. Of all the books with which a precocious 23-year-old might burst into print, a standard reference work seems the least likely. Yet Lemprière’s career as a ...”

“... Who now, other than historians of modern France, remembers Richard Cobb? Cobb’s Wikipedia entry – the canonical index of posterity’s interest – measures three lines; by contrast, Hugh Trevor-Roper, his principal addressee in this collection, gets five thousand words. Yet Cobb, who died in 1996, was not only a historian of acknowledged genius ...”

“... beheld’. The actors were hissed off stage, but Jonson, possessed of what the Renaissance scholar Joseph Loewenstein has called a ‘bibliographic ego’, was not a man to walk away. The printed text of 1631 includes sustained criticism of the audience (Jonson prefers ‘fastidious impertinents’) and a verse with the title ‘The just indignation ...”

“... In Sussex, the aspiring young cricketer who hit a ball through a church window found that Richard Montagu decided to prosecute him for sacrilege. In Norwich, both Montagu and Wren found themselves preoccupied with stopping ‘football and other profane activities’ in churchyards. It was not until the outburst of godly reformation ushered in by the ...”

“... Richard Cobb, who died last year at the age of 79, began his career as a historian of Revolutionary France. When I first met him, in 1968, he was widely thought to be able to write only in French, but as time went on a strong personal vein and a taste for high comedy widened the scope of his writing and revealed a highly distinctive English style: intricate perceptions and sensations set down in long, baroque sentences, full of Gallicisms, argot and incantatory lists of French and English place-names ...”

“... have never been established, despite extensive investigations by the staff of the Sunday Times. Richard Johns, Middle East editor of the Financial Times, who wrote most of the rest of the book, says in his introduction that he believes Holden ‘aroused, unjustifiably, the suspicion of some persons in the paranoid world of intelligence and subterfuge of ...”

“... resented, such as popular religious writing and children’s literature. That he was also a noted scholar and academic only makes appraisal of his achievements more perilous, since one group of loyalists will fear that focusing on his celebrity among various kinds of ‘ordinary reader’ signals an undervaluing of his contribution to the study of medieval ...”

“... of Islam contain a positive assessment of the 12th-century Kurdish prince Saladin, who fought Richard the Lionheart; and Reiske, who called for the incorporation of Islamic history into university curricula. ‘We wonder at the rapid progress of the victories of Alexander the Great, greater than anyone might conceive,’ he wrote in 1747. ‘Yet why do we ...”

“... archives, as well as on the Languet-Sidney correspondence and other letters secured by the private scholar James Osborn and published in his Young Philip Sidney (1972). Sidney’s life was a warp of virtue woven onto the woof of fortune. It was one of history’s ironies that Philip II of Spain was his godfather, and gave him his name. His fortune was to be a ...”

“... Americans who left the South as part of the Great Migration, seeking what Isabel Wilkerson (after Richard Wright) calls ‘the warmth of other suns’. In 1958 she arrived in Richmond, California, a town in the East Bay, north of Oakland and Berkeley, whose thriving Black communities maintained cultural and affective ties to Southern culture through ...”

“... of Christ (1729) was written when he was still a schoolboy at Winchester, and the much-derided Sir Richard Blackmore. Johnson later respected Blackmore’s The Creation (1712), which for Guest illustrates the route to divine wisdom through demystifying natural philosophy. Guest wisely doesn’t dwell too long on these individual cases, but her categories may ...”

“... professional journals, but their republication in one volume is a valuable tribute to a fine scholar who has contributed more than any other to our knowledge of the internal life of the Crusading kingdoms. All of them were written for an audience of academic specialists and some of the argument is perhaps more easily digested in the form in which it ...”

“... out romances for the mass market, and her fiction deteriorated into pap. Aldous, now a brilliant scholar progressing from Eton to Balliol, contemplated his aunt with fascination as she prostituted her art and ideals for the good name of the family. Years later, in 1917, he met Virginia Woolf at Heal’s. She wrote in her diary:we walked up and down a gallery ...”

“... Of the thousands​ of people who visited the Buckinghamshire astrologer-physician and clergyman Richard Napier around the beginning of the 17th century, many were troubled by questions of sleep. The mother of 11-year-old Susan Blundell told Napier that her daughter was ‘now given mutch to sleeping’, and that two days before, she had slept ‘the space of 24 houres but that her sleepe was interrupted with her usuall fites & that very often ...”

“... of the absurd – swelled up and burst in the 1900s, and salaams have been performed in front of Richard Olney’s Simple French Food by some of the most precious amateurs in New York and London. (Oddly, when so many food books of little worth are published here – the unspeakable in pursuit of the edible – this frugally illustrated, decently produced ...”