Officially, pedantry is never good. Yet ‘at the risk of being pedantic…’ is the opening gambit of someone who is finding you out in a significant inexactitude, and knows that they are right. Pedantry often seems intended to provoke. Sometimes, as Arnoud Visser says in this book, usefully so. ‘Vexatious fault-finding’ and ‘exasperating attention to detail’ can be salutary. Visser’s title allures you with the thought that he might be offering a vindication of small-minded precision.

The author is a Dutch professor of textual culture in the Renaissance and himself formidably widely read. His book exhibits many examples of the apparently timeless ‘allergy to pedantic intellectuals’ and, with its thirty pages of small-print endnotes, opens itself disarmingly to the charge of academic pedantry. But not until its epilogue does Visser out himself. At primary school, he confesses, he enjoyed correcting the teacher’s errors. As an adolescent, he was ‘verbally precocious’ and puzzled by the irritation that this aroused. Sadly, though, he has not written a defence of those who insist on pointing out small errors. On Pedantry is mainly an account not of pedantry itself, but of the hostility it incites.

Visser begins with the Sophists of ancient Greece, who aroused antagonism by promising (for money) to teach the tricks of verbal reasoning to affluent men who wanted to win arguments. They were ‘the first pedants avant la lettre in Western history,’ Visser believes. Moving swiftly from one age to another,