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“... was always unwilling to give ground and could sometimes be evasive. René Wellek, a Czech-American scholar and a historian of criticism, once politely challenged him to state the theoretical basis of his criticism. Leavis speedily and rather aggressively replied that nothing of the sort was needed, his criteria and his method were incorporated in what he ...”

“... and the Vision of Darkness. At some point around 1600, when the play was still new, the Cambridge scholar Gabriel Harvey was already noting (in a blank space at the end of his copy of Chaucer) that Shakespeare’s Lucrece ‘and his tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark have it in them, to please the wiser sort’. While the claim on the title page of the ...”

“... Richard Holmes published Shelley: The Pursuit in 1974. More than a decade later, in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), he recalled how obsessive his engagement gradually became, not just with Shelley, but with that whole group of English expatriates associated with him, as it moved from Geneva through Italy – Bagni di Lucca, Este, Venice, Rome, Naples, Ravenna, Pisa – shedding some members and adding others, before finally disintegrating when Shelley and Edward Williams were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822 ...”

“... by his descendants that the facts were unknown outside the family until 1916, when the Princeton scholar George McLean Harper broke the news.) Quite what part Wordsworth otherwise took in these violent times is obscure, but in old age he told an inquirer that he was ‘pretty hot in it’, and his response to revolutionary atrocity in the poem is strikingly ...”

“... a museum for the wali’s personal collection, the Antiqakhana, overseen by the influential scholar and reformer Rifa’a al-Tahtawi. Educated at al-Azhar and in Paris, al-Tahtawi was influential in presenting the country’s ancient history in textbooks used by generations of 19th-century Egyptian children (he is also one of the few Egyptians mentioned ...”

“... for lacking any sense of history. Collingwood illustrated his point with a tale about a scholar who insisted on translating the Greek word τριήρης as ‘steamship’ and, on being told that a trireme is nothing like a steamship, replied that this just showed the Greeks were ‘terribly muddle-headed’. MacIntyre cited the story in his first ...”

“... than others, on the books he wishes he’d written. The first section is on the Cambridge scholar and scientist Joseph Needham, microbiologist and expert on China, a man who fascinates Steiner and whom he wanted to write about in Frank Kermode’s Modern Masters series, published in the 1970s. Steiner had first seen Needham at a protest meeting ...”

“... Man Out of His Humour; Humfrey King, the poetic tobacconist; the barber-surgeons Tom Tooley and Richard Lichfield; the tavern joker John Stone. These loquacious oddballs found a small economic niche as ad hoc entertainers; they are haunters of St Paul’s Churchyard and the Inns of Court, of revels and convivia. We have no first-hand record of a Coryate ...”

“... Kevin Phillips, the author of American Dynasty, has given the association some thought: Biblical scholar Bruce Lincoln’s line-by-line analysis of Bush’s 7 October 2001 address to the nation announcing the US attack on Afghanistan identified a half dozen veiled borrowings from the Book of Revelation, Isaiah, Job, Matthew and Jeremiah. He concluded that ...”

“... year his blind daughter, Mary, was born – and suffered from a series of nervous illnesses which Richard Greaves unhelpfully approaches by means of psychiatric theory and William Styron’s compelling account of his own severe depression. In 1650 Bunyan had heard three or four women discussing religion: they were, he said, ‘far above out of my ...”

“... exporting of equipment, technologies of torture and bad lieutenants. To take one instance, Richard Zuley, a specialist at Guantánamo, had become reassuringly ruthless while working for a Chicago police unit that for decades interrogated predominantly African-Americans at so-called black sites. It’s only now, with a white supremacist ensconced in the ...”

“... and the content is the more approved the more it portrays the larger conflicts of society,’ Richard Humphrey wrote in The Historical Novel as Philosophy of History (1986); and since the size of the conflicts in history or society is assessed by the critic who assesses them in literature, and according to the same criteria, the argument is circular. An ...”

“... of his story, ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ (1927), are dispatched: ‘He was not a great scholar: the usual public school equipment.’ But Lawrence is most appealing when he is both satirical and aware of his own absurdity. Kinkead-Weekes reports that when Lawrence and Frieda arrived in Turin, in 1919, they stayed a night at the house of an ...”

“... development of later 17th-century drama. Powell’s is a most informative book, essential for any scholar or director at work on a Restoration play, but it scarcely has the stature of Norbrook’s study. Norbrook identifies a radical political tradition running through Renaissance literature, from More’s Utopia, through the ‘gospelling’ poets of the ...”

“... were both together in College at Eton and treated them therefore as equals; Bradshaw, a formidable scholar, was at home most evenings in his rooms to anyone who cared to call. But towards the end of the century a new type of bachelor don emerged. They were singularly appreciative of masculine beauty and did not hesitate to seek out and make friends with ...”