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“... nothing’ being the most spectacular. Richard Brinsley Sheridan is another plagiarist; Pope was a complete hypocrite; Kant was another who ‘had never read a book’; Goethe was simply no good. De Quincey, in the words of a genuine student of his, John Jordan, was interested in transcending this literature by ‘mining the German vein’. The ...”

“... For drama and pathos try Christopher Logue, and for sheer poetic artistry try Fitzgerald or Alexander Pope. And if, after this, you feel in need of some orality, have some friends round for dinner, put on some music and read it ...”

“... it is still hard to read it as anything but a deliberate exercise in metaphysical make-believe. Alexander Pope may have tried to take it seriously, but the vapid humanism of the Essay on Man, published in 1733, was a muddled travesty of Leibniz’s lofty and impassive stoicism. (‘Of Systems possible, if ’tis confest,/That Wisdom infinite must form ...”

“... years later described himself as a mere ‘under-labourer’ to ‘the incomparable Mr Newton’. Alexander Pope outbid Locke a few years later with his verdict that ‘God said “Let Newton be,” and all was light,’ and Voltaire could hardly open his mouth without praising ‘the mighty Newton’. Levenson promises to explain how a man supposedly ...”

“... must have looked like the saviours of Christian civilisation. In 1496 that worldly sophisticate Pope Alexander VI recognised this by awarding Catherine’s parents the title of ‘Catholic Monarchs’. Shrewd dynastic marriages for their children linked the Catholic Monarchs to the rulers of Portugal, the Low Countries and Habsburg Germany and ensured ...”

“... land’. He was received by rulers and prominent figures almost everywhere he went. He met the pope, the kings of France and Portugal, and the Holy Roman Emperor. As he explained: ‘I have come in search of artisans – skilled in manufacturing weapons and firearms – to travel to my land to manufacture them and teach our soldiers.’ The combination of ...”

“... because it presented ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’ (to quote Alexander Pope)? Or was it, perish the thought, a ‘quotation’ for the simple reason that it had appeared in earlier books of quotations, and so could be ripped off by buccaneers like Bartlett?The preface to the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary in ...”

“... he retold the ancient story of Adam’s sin and consequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden. When Alexander Pope wrote his Essay on Man in the following century he took care to parallel his work with Milton’s in the opening lines but then replaced the biblical myth with a story of an original (political) State of Nature, out of which we ...”

“... became his raw material. He fixated, for example, on Cesare Borgia, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, who had carved out a state of his own in northern Italy through considerable military intelligence and diplomatic cunning – and, of course, with the help of his father. ‘This lord is very splendid and magnificent,’ Machiavelli ...”

“... that occupied him from roughly 1250 to 1270 – to purge the ‘errors’ that concerned the pope and rehabilitate the Philosopher for Christian study. A more practical source of error was philological, because oral transmission, textual corruption and translation through an intermediary language, not to mention differences between the animals of ancient ...”

“... a broadly recognised set of common features (as one might use ‘Augustan’ to refer to Swift, Pope or Fielding and not to Defoe, Richardson or Blake) without claiming to force every individual case into a tight and elaborate fit. For him ‘Neo-Classicism’ means the rules codified by Renaissance pedagogues, the Horatian injunction to instruct and to ...”

“... Philip the Fair – the king who was soon to burn Knights Templar at the stake and to kidnap a pope – put a tax on all French bishoprics to help finance renewed hostilities against England. Pope Boniface VIII denounced the taxation of clerical property without ecclesiastical permission and Philip responded by banning ...”

“... died in 1599). In L’Essai sur les Moeurs he had seen fit to quote those who had described this Pope as ‘le plus haut, le meilleur, le plus grand des pontifs, des princes et des sages’, and had gone on to apply to him his own criteria for the good ruler and the great prince. By the 18th century there was no one to praise. This period is usually taken as ...”

“... attention in his revolutionary message. Protestants in their own eyes were the true Catholics. The pope’s followers were at best ‘Roman Catholics’, or at worst dupes of a devilish caricature of Jesus the Saviour of the World: an Italian ‘Vicar of Christ’ with papal tiara, sitting on the Seven Hills of Rome, who personified the Antichrist condemned in ...”

“... I am satisfied with Alexander and he ought to be satisfied with me,’ Napoleon wrote to the Empress Josephine in 1807. ‘If he were a woman, I think I would make him my mistress.’ Within five years, the tsar would repay Napoleon’s condescension by rolling back his conquests all across Europe, driving him to Paris and then St Helena, and finally building the Concert of Europe on the remains of his empire ...”