Al-Ṭūsī was a man of exceptionally wide erudition.
In his writing, Auerbach, who spent his postwar working life in the Israeli merchant marine, combines a wide erudition with a blunt, almost primitivist stylistic beauty.
In all her writing, Hoffman's consistent sensitivity is informed by her wide erudition, from her musical education to frequent Freudian insight, both psychoanalytic and philosophical.
Clement of Alexandria, the second known head of the catechetical school at Alexandria, possessed a wide erudition in the main classics and knew the works of Plato and Homer intimately.
He was smarter than anyone else, but also poignantly aware that being smart didn't necessarily get you very far, and that the most visible manifestations of smartness — wide erudition, mastery of trivia, rhetorical facility, love of argument for its own sake — could leave you feeling empty, baffled and dumb.
He wrote with a wide-ranging erudition, tracing influences within the history of jazz and comparing them with the lineages of other art forms.
His works are, however, considered remarkable for their wide-ranging erudition, their wit and irony, their passion for social justice, and their classical clarity, qualities that mark France as an heir to the tradition of Denis Diderot and Voltaire.
His personal charm and wide-ranging erudition quickly attracted powerful advocates: Conrad helped launch his career after they met in Capri, in 1904, and he was closely associated with D. H. Lawrence until Douglas picked a public quarrel with him.
Do say that Hilton's new book is itself deliciously Ruskinian in its wide-ranging erudition, far superior (London's Evening Standard) to the much shorter biography by John Batchelor, also published to mark the centenary of Ruskin's death.
This author's books are rhetorical equivalents of gas giants: their nominal subjects are the super-compressed cores exerting an unseen unifying gravitation, and the author's enormous erudition, wide reading, and kitten-like distractibility form the layers and layers of roiling, chaotic, atmosphere extending for huge distances in all directions around the core.
