Colin Burrow

Colin Burrow is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His books include Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity and Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity, as well as editions of Ben Jonson, Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets. His first contribution to the LRB, in 1999, was on British and Irish poetry of the Civil War; he has since written more than seventy pieces for the paper, on subjects from Catullus and Virgil to Hilary Mantel and Ursula Le Guin.

Despite his intellectual origins in ordinary language philosophy there is something profoundly unordinary about Stanley Cavell’s syntax, in its refusal to let words rest, or to arrive where they seem to be going. This style, clotted, retortive, says to its readers: ‘Paraphrase me if you dare, for I have still secrets from you.’

Letter

Skulduggery

21 April 2022

Bernard Richards asks for ‘chapter and verse’ to support my suggestion that Pope’s skulduggery over the publication of his letters was ‘a major reason’ for the decline in his reputation in the 19th century (Letters, 26 May). So I’ll let him have it.Isaac D’Israeli’s much reprinted Quarrels of Authors (1814) included ‘A Narrative of the Extraordinary Transactions Respecting the Publication...

Puppeteer Poet: Pope’s Luck

Colin Burrow, 21 April 2022

‘Pope has had bad luck,’ F.R. Leavis once declared. It’s true that his reputation suffered a big dip in the 19th century, but otherwise he did pretty well for himself, all things considered. He was only four foot six and suffered from curvature of the spine in an age when physical disabilities were often taken to imply moral deformity. He was a Catholic during years in which...

Song of Snogs: Catullus Bound

Colin Burrow, 2 December 2021

Catullus was a master of many kinds of oral delight. The real challenge in translating him is to capture the pleasure and the delicacy that exists alongside the frank and direct filth.

Ti tum ti tum ti tum: Chic Sport Shirker

Colin Burrow, 7 October 2021

The fact that the letters of the word ‘critic’ are all present and in the correct order within ‘Christopher Ricks’ is a wonderful coincidence that might make you think that he was born, or at least baptised, to do what he does so well. However it is an arbitrary and probably uninteresting coincidence that a full anagram of ‘Christopher Ricks’ is ‘chic sport shirker’, since Ricks isn’t so far as I know famous for skiving games while sporting a Versace tracksuit.

Don’t break that fiddle: Eclectic Imitators

Tobias Gregory, 19 November 2020

The boundary between the broader and narrower senses has never been firm, and the history of literary imitation has always been bound up with the histories of philosophy, rhetoric and education. Plato,...

Read more reviews

I must needs acknowledge, that the Greeke and Latine tongues, are great ornaments in a Gentleman, but they are purchased at over-high rate. Montaigne, Essays I grew up​ in postwar...

Read more reviews

Mr Who He? Shakespeare’s Poems

Stephen Orgel, 8 August 2002

In his own time, Shakespeare was much better known to the reading public as a poet than as a playwright. Venus and Adonis went through ten editions before his death in 1616, and another six...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences