Slow death of the know-it-all

POLYMATHY THRIVES ON an eccentric sense of priority, and so it is perhaps not surprising that polymaths are involved in a rather nervous competition to see who can be last to cross the finishing line. That race, as Peter Burke’s new book reminds us, has often been prematurely concluded, with the embarrassing result that the freshly-crowned “last polymath”, “last renaissance man”, or “last man to know everything”, must forfeit his insecure title as another late entrant crawls into view.

Still, any claim to truly encyclopaedic knowledge made in the present rightly strikes us as implausible — at the limit, barely intelligible — and that is not to mention the inevitable garishness, the faint air of nostalgic desperation, involved in any claim to being a “renaissance man” (a bit like admitting to taking part in civil war re-enactment theatre). So, perhaps the race is finally over; Burke speculates gloomily in the book’s coda that no polymath has been