Alastair Fowler is Regius Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh and Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is A Short History of English Literature and he is working on the New Oxford Book of l7th-Century Verse.
When the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of James Bond’s great work, Birds of the West Indies.
According to Boswell, Johnson was so hostile to gesticulation that ‘when another gentleman thought he was giving additional force to what he uttered, by expressive movements of his hands,...
This Textual Companion is described by the publisher as ‘an indispensable companion to The Complete Oxford Shakespeare’, which indeed it is, and it was reasonable to complain, when
New works of literary theory, abundant in France and America, are not very frequent in England. When one does appear, it is customary first to deplore its defiance of nature and reason, and...
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