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“... Not that the reluctant novelist was uneducated. In his youth, he had been a good Latin scholar; later he taught himself French and Italian; when mathematics engaged his interest, he travelled once a week to Birmingham to study with a teacher there. Bage brought to novel-writing a well-stocked mind and wide-ranging curiosity. The novel – that ...”

“... Pope adds in a manuscript comment that he may have had from the struggling poet and hellraiser Richard Savage. In typically tantalising style, Curll alleged in print that the ill-matched babes were ‘Offspring of a Poet and a Bookseller’. The first task for any Haywood biographer, plainly, is to clear away the flak and innuendo. Some years ago, King ...”

“... and pen. The many narrative tributaries first came together in a single stream when the French scholar and antiquarian Antoine Galland used a 14th or 15th-century Syrian manuscript he had brought back from his travels in the Middle East as the basis for seven volumes of stories that he entitled Les Mille et Une Nuits, which appeared between 1701 and ...”

“... And finally, after re-establishing contact with Amy Bellette, he finds himself entangled with Richard Kliman, a ruthless young scholar who is writing E.I. Lonoff’s biography, in which he will reveal the scandal buried far in his subject’s past which he believes is the key to Lonoff’s work. Which reminds us of the ...”

“... the poor in any case. In 1391, ten years after the Peasants’ Revolt, the House of Commons asked Richard II to forbid serfs from sending their children to school, in order to ‘save the honour of all freemen of the realm’ (the king did nothing about it). Whatever his connections with the Peasants’ Revolt itself, the curiously cross-grained author of ...”

“... of the story rests on an 18th-century source. This places Somer as a servant in the household of Richard Fermor, a Northamptonshire Catholic, whose property, fool included, Henry seized after finding Fermor guilty of assisting an imprisoned priest. (The coupling of Fermor and Somer remains unverified.)In Fool: In Search of Henry VIII’s Closest Man, the ...”

“... many gifts to the study of Russia. He could handle many languages, and his training as a Classical scholar gave him a capacity for careful drafting and textual criticism. He had also had a very wide experience of life, for he had been a diplomat and a journalist (assistant editor of the Times) as well as an academic. The Russian character fascinated him. His ...”

“... as though he were inexorably being subsumed by dreams and shadows. The French translator and scholar Pierre Hourcade, who visited Lisbon in 1933, remembered leaving a café with Pessoa, and walking with him for a few blocks. Hourcade had, Richard Zenith writes, ‘this uncanny sensation: that the poet, as soon as he ...”

“... the little magazines, and traditional critical journals such as Partisan Review and the American Scholar. It is not published in New York. 6. The golden age of criticism is widely regarded by sober, intelligent people as a bad thing. It is seen as anarchistic, esoteric, obscure, élitist and academic. It is regarded by persons of traditional common sense as ...”

“... Martha Nussbaum is a classical scholar and moral philosopher who in several books and a great many essays has advanced a thesis about the cognitive power of emotions. Feeling, she says, is part of thought. Only accidents of usage and the rationalist prepossessions of modern philosophy could have made us think otherwise ...”

“... American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of Charles Lamb (the ‘gentle-hearted’) – but the broad allusion did pretty much what was wanted, assuring the theoretically advanced that they were now top dogs. Condescension usually has an anxious motive. Eliot, as Tom Paulin is on hand to ...”

“... us more tightly into a neoliberal regime.’ Gill is describing an instance of what the American scholar Lauren Berlant calls ‘cruel optimism’. People open themselves to exploitation when the sense of self-worth that derives from doing something they believe in comes up against a hierarchical authority that is secretive, arbitrary and ruthless. Cruel ...”

“... slew of 23 dedications which includes such flat entireties as these: – For F. Chesney Horwood, scholar and friend. – For Essie and Diana Browning, with affection. The other side of this warm welcome by Room is his compensatory need to give his guests the cold shoulder. He keeps up a sour commentary for the run of the book. Though his chosen ...”

“... Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and worldwide backing of one of America’s largest publishing ...”

“... of logic’, and he composed a series of dialogues between a Catholic priest and an indigenous scholar, designed to demonstrate the balance of logic and faith lying at the heart of the Western spiritual tradition, and hence Christianity’s superiority. Missionaries were followed by diplomats (allowed into Peking when the Qing Government succeeded the ...”