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“... Young men who join gangs are participating in an alternative system of social cohesion. Each gang upholds its collective will through a range of penalties which include death, torture and mutilation, and keeps poverty at bay by theft and the sale of contraband, or, in more mature organisations, by kidnap and racketeering. In time, leadership concentrates in the man whose mastery of the idiom is the most complete, and he becomes the ‘godfather’, his authority protected, outside his immediate family, by a perimeter wall of terror ...”

“... Positively medieval,’ we say, implying a scheme of historical periods which underlies most of what we think and do. The Middle Ages, to 1485, were barbarous and, luckily for them, also an ‘age of faith’; then came the Renaissance with its humane values and realism, a recognisable ancestor to the modern world. The job of testing the assumptions behind this distinction is never-ending, and we must be grateful to scholars who have done it well ...”

“... To the modern eye the European Middle Ages were palpably Christian, with all those cathedrals and crusades. But in the minds of the Renaissance scholars who invented the term, the adjective ‘middle’ meant that the Middle Ages began with the fall of the Roman Empire c.400, and for a substantial fraction of that time ‘medieval Christendom’ was largely not Christian at all ...”

“... Can a political leader be a saint? Private morality can’t be the sole criterion. Politicians have to make decisions in a cruel and perplexing world, and some consequences of even the best decisions will be morally repugnant. The question is inveterate. Our medieval forebears answered it by simply declaring some people to be ‘saints’. An early medieval king remembered as a saint was nearly always one who had either opted out of active kingship to lead a private life of exemplary piety while others did the dirty work, or one who had been killed in a Christian cause ...”

“... Europe, and one of the supposed critical moments was the 16th-century Reformation, which is where Alexander Murray’s Suicide in the Middle Ages comes in. The present descriptive volume is the first of an opus tripartitum. Here Murray offers the corpus of evidence, both narrative and legal, for the five hundred or ...”

“... biography of Bruce to have been published in over two centuries. The first, by the Orientalist Alexander Murray, which is included in the second and third editions of Bruce’s Travels (1805, 1813), is brief but important, revealing discrepancies between Bruce’s original notebook and his subsequently published narrative. The second, much ...”

“... alone in the Berkshire woods, where he enjoys a visit from his old high-school English teacher, Murray Ringold. As the 90-year-old Murray passes several martini-flavoured nights on Nathan’s porch, their conversation returns again and again to Murray’s long dead brother Ira, who was ...”

“... Some things​ in the relations between authors and publishers never change. Dear Mr Murray, edited by David McClay (John Murray, £16.99), a collection of letters written to six generations of the Murray family, is full of familiar complaints ...”

“... John Murray’s fiction has always seemed to arise directly from the circumstances of his own life. At first, his work concentrated on his childhood and adolescence among the tiny, depressed communities that straggle along the English side of the Solway Firth. He then broke with his working-class background and read Sanskrit and Avestan at Oxford, later studying classical Indian medicine ...”

“... Triremes seem to have enjoyed a continuous history into late antiquity, but after the death of Alexander the Great, the kings and kinglets who competed for his legacy began to build much bigger ships, and the reason for this is more difficult to explain. The basic trieres was a ‘three’, but literary sources tell us of ‘fives’ and ‘sixes’, and ...”

“... the early days of the project, from Dean Trench’s lecture of 1857 to the appointment of James Murray as editor in 1879. Much attention is given to the personalities: one would like to know why Trench was ‘deeply embarrassed’ by his participation in the Torrijos rebellion (the DNB indicates disillusion rather than personal failings). Herbert Coleridge ...”

“... is well illustrated, though I hope no future author will reproduce the ghastly portrait of Gilbert Murray by a relation which the National Portrait Gallery foolishly accepted. The Victorians made the Greeks out to have been far more like themselves than they can have been: by now anthropology and sociology have shown how dangerous analogies between their ...”

“... Andrew Millar, William Strahan, Thomas Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once complained, but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that put Scotland on the literary map. For John Pinkerton, an Edinburgh ...”

“... Here (in English translation) are the great Latinist George Buchanan and the Gaelic poet Alexander Mac-Donald. Duncan Ban MacIntyre’s expansive 18th-century Gaelic poem on deer (echoes of which can be heard in Crichton Smith and Les Murray) is juxtaposed with John Davidson’s ‘A Runnable Stag’. This should ...”

“... MacDiarmid’s verse) is designed to be controversial. It should be set beside the recent work of Alexander Broadie, to whose explorations of The Circle of John Mair: Logic and Logicians in Pre-Reformation Scotland Davie makes reference. The last section of The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect is entitled ‘Back to John Mair?’, Davie is trying to extend ...”