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“... Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole enterprise, I do think, is compromised by those gestures towards ‘the English Spirit’, ‘the making of a tradition’ etc. (They come thickest, it is true, in the ...”

“... of the origin of visual art and of the function of its different forms, and was the inspiration of Richard Payne Knight’s Discourse on the Worship of Priapus. Like Haskell, he had the storyteller’s ability to ‘captivate’ his audience, and nothing could be more appropriate, in Haskell’s account of the life and adventures of this picaresque ...”

“... a Soviet spy, and with her support, Kuczynski was recruited by Moscow and received a visit from Richard Sorge, a charismatic German described by Macintyre as ‘a strange mixture of bibliophile and brawler, pedantic scholar and hard-nosed functionary … a dissolute warrior-priest’.* The Hamburger home became a ...”

“... because it’s been notably well covered in recent and not so recent historiography. The late Richard Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages presented an integrated vision of the 11th and 12th centuries that has worn remarkably well. Given Jordan’s own research into the reign of Louis IX and the 13th-century Crusades, it comes as no surprise to find ...”

“... Syriac and Arabic tongues (in which those who confer with him familiarly affirm that he is no mean scholar) and of the humanities; also he will correct loyally, carefully and faithfully whatever is entrusted to him, without ever seeking to parade his learning or show off before others, for he is very retiring and most assiduous at the tasks assigned to ...”

“... far beyond death’s immediate ‘scattering of breath’. But for me – I take my cue from a scholar who discusses this material, Eugene Wang – the figures whose presence on the banner goes on attracting my attention are a handful of dead individuals setting out on the journey, along the very first yards of the dragon-tail way. ‘Dishevelled’, Wang ...”

“... credit for seeing Shakespeare’s Sonnets into print in 1609, a ‘possibility that … no scholar has ever considered’ – which will come as a surprise to longtime LRB readers who remember Barbara Everett’s similar argument in these pages.* Greer’s task in this ambitious, brilliant and too often misguided biography is to bring Ann Hathaway to ...”

“... When Richard Rorty died last year, the New York Times called him ‘one of the world’s most influential contemporary thinkers’. Few philosophers would accept this assessment. Rorty was widely read and admired by many, he had a good nose for a controversy and was impressive in oral debate. But his influence on philosophy has, so far, been minimal: Rorty’s unconvincing attempts to show that traditional philosophy has had its day have largely been ignored by philosophers ...”

“... He had painstakingly learned how to use the figures of rhetoric to shape sentences when he was a scholar at St Paul’s and later at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The diary allows him to loosen the hold of formal rhetorical structure on his prose (many of his official letters display the pomposity which can come of lamplight and rhetorical effort) while ...”

“... pay and to return $250,000 to the Trust. It was a spectacularly extravagant decision to commission Richard Meier in 1984 to build a new Getty Center – including the chief museum, the Research Institute and the Conservation Center – as a cluster of buildings on a hilltop in Brentwood accessible only (for ordinary visitors and most staff) by a steep ...”

“... of Lincoln’s career that had mostly been swept under the rug. Outraged members of what one scholar has called the ‘Lincoln-Industrial Complex’ rushed to defend the Great Emancipator.Insisting on ‘the complete falsity of the charges of innate racism’, Reynolds joins the defence. He insists that in interactions with individual African ...”

“... becoming a legend. He decorated his tattered gown with jam tins. He was a terrific Classical scholar but neglected the set books ‘most scandalously’, as he said himself. Studying philosophy, he boasted of acknowledging no superior mind among his teachers. Against all the odds posed by his clearly superior abilities, he contrived to get second-class ...”

“... percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public attitudes than lives lived long and ...”

“... three volumes of basic source material, the first two with Stanley Wertheim, another Crane scholar: The Correspondence of Stephen Crane (1988) and The Crane Log (1994), a 450-page chronology which imposes order on the spotty record of Crane’s life. Stephen Crane Remembered (2006), which includes 62 reminiscences of Crane from every stage of his ...”

“... two biographies of Ellison which are useful in quite different ways. Five years ago, the young scholar Lawrence Jackson published Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius. It was in effect the first real biography, and not much noticed, though it was a compelling portrait. Jackson chose as his subject-matter only Ellison’s history up to the publication of ...”