“Getting to grips with minds is difficult,” writes Clare Bucknell in her review of Arnoud Visser’s On Pedantry in our May 14 art issue, which is perhaps why historical accusations of pedantry were often based less on the practitioner’s actual erudition than their conduct. As it turns out, humans have long been interested in intellectuals and dilettantes behaving poorly. Drawing on case studies from the Sophists of Ancient Greece to the “unmarriageable” studious women of the early modern period, Bucknell traces the evolution of the word “pedantry.”  Bucknell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her most recent book, The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture, explores how poetry anthologies have shaped British politics and society over centuries. Her writing for the Review has covered a range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers and artists, including Alexander Pope, Charles Lamb, James Gillray, John Sloane, and Jane and Maria Porter. She is a contributing writer at the London Review of Books and has also written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and Apollo Magazine. This month, I wrote to Bucknell to ask her about the history …