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“... Hobbes studies are booming. The production of books and articles on Hobbes and everything (Hobbes and Laughter; Hobbes and the American Constitution; Hobbes and Vico, or Dryden, or Hegel ...) has reached record levels. Yet the essential scholarly machinery on which one might expect such a thriving industry to depend is in fact jerry-built and creaking with age: the standard edition of Hobbes’s works was published nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, and suffers from incompleteness, unreliable transcriptions and an often arbitrary choice of copy-texts ...”

“... of sources for Campanella’s idiosyncratic vision, from Plato to Thomas More. What no one before Noel Malcolm noticed – although it would be unmistakable to any student of the early modern Middle East – is the extent to which the city of the sun was modelled on the Ottoman Empire.From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, as ...”

“... so that the present conflict is simply the latest of these ethnic wars. This picture is false, as Noel Malcolm’s new history of Bosnia helps to show. The Bosnians have been a distinct people since at least the tenth century. In the Middle Ages, theirs was a no-man’s-land between the eastern and western worlds of Constantinople and Rome. Because of ...”

“... of Leviathan in 1651) were when dealing with Hobbes, who was assumed to be an atheist. (Malcolm thinks this assumption was false, but Hobbes’s close friend Sorbière seems to have shared the common view, judging by his paraphrase of Lucretius in his letter of 1645.) Oldenburg was writing to Hobbes about applied mathematics, but, like so many ...”

“... in that bar in Cambridge, or that this Oxford edition of Leviathan has been so eagerly awaited. Noel Malcolm’s magnificent feat of scholarship, which presents the English (1651) and Latin (1668) versions of Leviathan side by side, does not disappoint. Malcolm presents us with three volumes. The introduction, a ...”

“... could, or even should, a history of nonsense make sense? This is one of the questions raised by Noel Malcolm’s study of English nonsense verse – a book which is itself, appropriately, an apparent sport in a career otherwise devoted to Hobbes’s letters and the geopolitics of the Balkans. Perhaps only an author raised on Leviathan and hardened by ...”

“... surrendered without a fight; and that Gjakova had been completely sacked. Both passages come from Noel Malcolm’s Kosovo: A Short History. The first describes the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from territories taken over by Serbia in 1877 and 1878; the second the conquest of Kosovo by the Serbian Army 34 years later. In 1912, Kosovo was still under ...”

“... In the next two chapters – ‘Grotius and Selden’ (Richard Tuck) and ‘Hobbes and Spinoza’ (Noel Malcolm) – we see these demands being met by theorists operating for the most part in Netherlands and English political contexts which are depicted in sufficient detail to let us understand the movement out of them into a sphere of cosmopolitan ...”

“... her record is impressive and where she has wisely relied on the best of the Balkans commentators, Noel Malcolm. ‘Throughout my political life I have usually sought to avoid compromise,’ the former Prime Minister characteristically says, ‘because it more often than not turns out to involve an abdication of principle.’ One does not have to wonder ...”

“... and beatings have become routine. In the face of this, Albanians are now engaged in what Noel Malcolm calls ‘the politics of as if’.* Exiled within their own country, they began in the early Nineties to create a parallel state. In a secret referendum held in 1991, 87 per cent of the voters agreed to declare Kosovo a sovereign and independent ...”

“... excerpt was entered in the book under a single heading, it could not be moved around thereafter. Noel Malcolm has described the system invented by the country clergyman Thomas Harrison, who explained it to Charles I during a two-hour conversation in 1638. It involved writing excerpts on small pieces of paper, which were then stuck onto hooks attached to ...”

“... extremists will go on trying to drive out Serbs to create facts on the ground,’ the historian Noel Malcolm argues. Other Western officials believe the deliberate ambiguity of UN Resolution 1244 does not preclude independence and that any attempt to tamper with it would push the Russians and Chinese into a veto when it comes up for renewal. ‘Once we ...”

“... day. Here he is describing one of his boss’s difficulties: Mia had a big white cat named Malcolm that she adored. She was always talking sign language to the cat, who was deaf. Mia’s obsession with Malcolm was bad enough, but the sign language really got on Frank’s nerves. He didn’t mind cats in general, but ...”

“... Montez and Dudley Moore. Kim Novak and Ivor Novello are neighbours, but then so are Mozart and Malcolm Muggeridge, and the French sandwich of Arletty and Yvonne Arnaud contains Anthony Armstrong-Jones. The name of Neville Chamberlain seems to set off a nervous chain-reaction of theatricality, for he is noisily succeeded by Gower Champion, Coco ...”

“... the foremost modern theorist of sovereignty, are at different ends of the political spectrum: Noel Malcolm of All Souls, editor of Leviathan for Oxford, on the right; Richard Tuck of Harvard, author of the finest contextualisation of Hobbes’s thought, on the left. Differing in outlook in so many ways, their convergence on Brexit is all the more ...”