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Colin Burrow: Pedantry, 9 July 2026

On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All 
by Arnoud S.Q. Visser.
Princeton, 333 pp., £25, November 2025, 978 0 691 25756 3
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... are often represented as pointy-headed geeks who understand nothing about the world as it is? Arnoud Visser thinks so. He gives a learned and extended history of pedantry, which begins with what he terms pedants avant la lettre, the Sophists in fifth-century Athens, and ends with bad films about mad scientists and nutty professors. He argues that the ...

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