Search Results

“... the bill came, he had vanished, leaving his fuming guests to pay up. The internationally famous scholar had apparently unmasked himself as a vulgar conman. The grubby final chapter of this episode confirmed what Delaloge already suspected. This ‘Le Clerc’ was not the literary celebrity he claimed to be, but an impostor: a former monk named ...”

“... built in the mid-16th century, as the ne plus ultra of aspirational timber framing. The carpenter, Richard Dale, whose name appears with that of the owner, William Moreton, on one of the windows, gave the framing a raking design which creates on the exterior an elaborate dazzle effect. Starting out with an H-plan house, Dale and Moreton added every latest ...”

“... to insist on his greatness? Because Coleridge isn’t in this book, in the way that he isin Richard Holmes’s recent, sensitive profile in the Oxford ‘Past Masters’ series. Does a study like Levere’s miss some point, or is one merely making an obvious remark about the difference between ‘biography’ and ‘intellectual history’? Authors and ...”

“... explained everything, the fault line in 20th-century consciousness. The gaunt, close-cropped scholar, hugging himself against the cold on a late-season esplanade, is like one of those small birds who pick meat from a crocodile’s teeth. He has chased Ackroyd, dogged him, as the stone-throwing ‘Deputy’ worries Stony Durdles in The Mystery of Edwin ...”

“... of the scholarly sarcasm that was perfected a century later by the great Cambridge classical scholar Richard Bentley. But it suggests that Chapman was less motivated by a desire to understand Homeric society in itself than to insist to his vernacular readers that he alone was the truest and best interpreter of Homer. Chapman got it wrong here, as he ...”

“... this position during the period with which we are concerned.’ Thus, the introduction of Sir Richard Southern’s Making of the Middle Ages. Bartlett quoted it in a perceptive recent tribute to Southern, with the rider that ‘every century has its protagonists,’ but ‘those who see the 11th and 12th centuries as a time of particularly significant ...”

“... for the future. Odoevtsev, like Pankratov, is personally involved: his grandfather, a famous scholar, was denounced by his father and sent to Siberia; now, freed and rehabilitated, the old man returns to Leningrad; Odoevtsev visits him, suffering, in a brilliantly written scene, agonies of embarrassment, not so much from the emotional problems as from ...”

“... a result one is often gloriously not quite sure where one is. To be uncertain for a moment whether Richard Corbet’s ‘Distracted Puritan’ (‘Come heare me pray nine times a day,/And fill your heads with Crotchets’) comes from the 1640s or from the 1620s gives a very good impression of the way poems from the earlier part of the period were transformed ...”

“... epic’. We might also compare him with the hero-villains of Shakespeare, with Brutus, Macbeth or Richard III, raging at the ghosts of their victims. Francis Phelan is not a pathetic old man: he is frightening. When we walk guiltily past the alcoholic tramps of Charing Cross, there are some who seem too degraded to be helped and others who seem too ...”

“... him to remain hidden, the man in the mask, detached, even disdainful. The walking embodiment of Richard Sennett’s 18th-century public man, Cuvier vigilantly kept up his public front in an age increasingly given over to effusions of Romantic sincerity and authenticity. The real Cuvier thus remains concealed for good behind the smokescreens of ...”

“... variety of chivalric culture in which literacy had a place. But knights were hard men. The great scholar Abelard, to be sure, was taught to read and write as his knightly father had been before him, but he also learned the aggression of his social class and brought the competitiveness of the duel to his scholarly debates. Churchmen attempted to harness the ...”

“... by a second hero, Mr Ralph Bateman. Mr Laurence is primarily and most formidably a bibliographical scholar. His bibliography of Shaw is awaited by all those engaged in Shaw studies with something of the frenzy of telephone subscribers without directories. One of the chief features of Shaw’s Music is the 125,000 words that Mr Laurence has patiently and ...”

“... as rallying the family together for the next dreadful challenge that faces them. The 19th-century scholar Fustel de Coulanges had on the basis of current practice among the French nobility supposed that the Greeks worshipped their ancestors, and that from that practice developed the notion of the larger kinship groups called phratriai which survived as ...”

“... Star declares here, and his collection offers helpful accounts of influential thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Benedict Anderson and the radical-turned-Neo-Conservative historian Eugene Genovese, as well as thoughtful reviews of significant debates, such as the contested legacy of Darwin (Stephen Jay Gould v. sociobiology), the stake of revisionist ...”

“... trouble of getting Gregory Elliott to edit it – out of respect for a man who is not only a major scholar of Soviet history but also a figure of distinction in the world of radical historians. On the assumption that many people will approach the book wanting to know how he has reacted to recent developments and archival discoveries in Russia, and whether ...”