Sublime farrago of out-of-the-way research, crowded with facts and yet full of life, assembled over a fifty-year period by the kindly pedant who was father to the Victorian politician and novelist Benjamin Disraeli. 'Curiosities of Literature' is his best-known work; Walter de la Mare, Kipling and Patrick O'Brian are among the authors who have found inspiration in its pages. D'Israeli is perhaps strongest on the political and religious turmoils of 17th-century England, but there is scarcely any place or time (as then known to European scholarship) in which he is a stranger. ( )