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“... interesting, while his best – on clowning, Kyd, Mucedorus – are really first-rate. Ann PasternakSlater’s new book is, by contrast, consistently disappointing. And that’s a pity, because the subject – Shakespeare’s articulation of his plays through explicit and implicit stage directions – is a ...”

“... A not unmalicious fellow poet once said of Pasternak that he resembled a horse: ‘the same big awkward profile and large eyes that seem to look intently without seeing anything’. The horse-faced parsnip – Pasternak means parsnip in Russian. This is very endearing. What other great poet has the bigness and animal closeness of the equine, and words that plod like hooves with such delicate precision through twigs and grasses? The girls chanting the ‘candle’ poem at his funeral must also have longed to have given him a lump of sugar? One of the best little scenes in Dr Zhivago is the doctor riding home through the Urals forest, with his slow beast undulating under him, and ‘dry volleys of sound bursting from the horse’s guts ...”

“... of new fashions in sexual liberation. Her college, St Hugh’s, was, in the words of her friend Ann PasternakSlater, ‘a warren of nervous adolescent virgins and a few sexually liberated sophisticates’ with ‘an atmosphere airless and prickly as a hot railway compartment … Being laid back about being laid was ...”

“... Mr Todd asks Tony, to which he flimsily replies: ‘I suppose so.’ (In her study on Waugh, Ann PasternakSlater reports that the manuscript actually read, ‘I suppose no,’ which conveys an even more spineless sort of agnosticism.)The inheritance plot is to be found as well in Brideshead Revisited and the ...”