At the end of the 16th century, scholars and intellectuals were seen as Faustian magicians, dangerous and sexy. By the 19th century, they were perceived as dusty and dried up, "dead from the waist down", as Browning so wickedly put it. In this study, a literary critic explores the various ways we have thought about scholars and scholarship through the ages. A.D. Nuttall focuses on three people, two real and one fictitious: the classical scholar Isaac Casaubon who lived from 1559 to 1614; Mark Pattison, 19th-century rector at Oxford; and Mr Casaubon in George Eliot's "Middlemarch". The three are intricately related, for Pattison was seen by many as the model for Eliot's Mr Casaubon and he was also the author of the best book on Isaac Casaubon. Nuttall offers a penetrating interpretation of "Middlemarch" and then describes how Pattison recorded his own introverted intellectual life and self-lacerating depression. He presents Isaac Casaubon, on the other hand, as a fulfilled scholar who personifies the ideal of detailed, unspectacular truth-telling, often imperilled in our own culture. Nuttall concludes with a meditation on morality, sexuality and the true virtues of scholarship.

This is the first comprehensive account of the life and work of the distinguished scholar and public figure Gilbert Muray (1866-1957). Sixteen contributors survey his childhood, his work in the theatre and in international relations, his Greek scholarship and contributions on religion and philosophy, his friendships (including those with Bertrand Russell and A. E. Housman), his long commitment to the Home University Library, his radio work, and his involvement with psychic research. The book opens with memoirs by two of his grandchildren. Two biographies of Murray were published in the 1980s, but the range of his activities makes it impossible for a single person to encompass them all adequately. This book, published 50 years after his death, aims to proved a comprehensive reassessment of a remarkable man.

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Product Description: Richard Claverhouse Jebb (1841-1905) is a leading figure in the history of British classical scholarship and education in the last third of the 19th century. Celebrated as an editor of all the surviving plays of Sophocles, Jebb, as this collection illustrates, had exceptionally wide interests in the field of classical studies and was keenly involved in public affairs...read more

Product Description: Fiercer than Tigers: The Life and Works of Rex Warner details the personal and intellectual history of a literary legend of the 1930s and 1940s. His unique fictions The Wild Goose Chase (1937), The Professor (1938), and The Aerodrome (1941), remain powerful reflections on the turbulent politics of the period...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This book is the personal memoir of one of the most eminent classical scholars of his generation. the virtue of this absorbing book is the authors unflinching desire to present the whole truth as he remembers it. it is a work of genuine inquiry or as the Greeks called it history

An illuminating biography of the major classical scholar and poet draws on published and unpublished materials in its detailed coverage of Housman's homosexuality, his transition from deism to atheism, and his belief in an indifferent universe

Product Description: This memoir by the late distinguished classicist tells of Dodds' travels from China to San Francisco, his encounters with literary figures including Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and MacNeice, and his conflicting educations in Belfast, Dublin, and Oxford...read more

Product Description: This early study of A. E. Housman, first published in October 1936 just months after Housman's death, was written by his friend and colleague at Trinity College, Cambridge, A. S. F. Gow. As well as offering a skilful and illuminating portrait of Housman's life and character, Gow's study importantly draws together a list of Housman's collected papers - a list which was revised by Housman himself and included citations to publications that he expressly desired should not be reprinted or collected...read more