They are in thrall not to John Maynard Keynes, sage of the Depression, but to his Cambridge contemporary, Frank Ramsey, a precocious polymath who made his contributions in the prelapsarian 1920s.
Theirs was a serious business, and even those reviewers who wore their learning lightly, like George Bernard Shaw and Ernest Newman, could be trusted to know what they were about.
他们的写作件严肃的事情,人们相信:甚至那些博学低调喜欢炫耀的评论家,比如 George Bernard Shaw 和 Ernest Newman也知道自己在做什么。
But everybody was stuck. A brilliant English physicist and polymath, Thomas Young, correctly worked out that a group of hieroglyphs repeated several times on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name-that of Ptolemy.
It's a quick summary, so they understand exactly who are they dealing with, and what's their realm of knowledge to figure out are you a good fit or not.
He has good comedic instinct, you can even call him witty but you can’t call him smart or well informed the best salesman could sell you a TV without knowing anything about it because the TV isn’t what matters.
Born into privilege in the early 19th Century, Florence Nightingale was a polymath genius, she spoke multiple languages and pioneered concepts of statistical analysis that are still used today.