The Editors

Reading Charles Lamb in Penguin's new edition, we were struck by this expression of frustration in ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’ (1822): What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando’s, keeps the paper! I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling out incessantly, ‘the Chronicle is in hand, Sir.’ Lamb’s fondness for chicken – ‘those tame villatic fowl’ – is well-documented (though he preferred roast pork), as is his reluctance to sit through grace when a sumptuous me

Jeanette Winterson and Anne Tyler, among others, are rewriting Shakespeare's plays for Random House. Just in at the LRB is a review copy of a much bolder project, Marcus Brady's self-published Dark, Love and Light: A 21st-Century Play with Shakespeare-Style Language.

Michael Dobson in the LRB, 17 January 1999: Every year, on a Saturday morning in April, the miscellaneous participants in the most improbably charming event in the official national calendar gather for a cup of tea in the Georgian town hall of a small market town in the West Midlands. There is a great deal of scarlet in evidence, in the robes of the assembled Council and of sundry invited academics, white in the vestments of the local clergy, and a respectable quantity of gold in the mayoral chains of office; there are any number of sombre grey suits on visiting diplomats and corporate sponsors; and outside the sunshine, if there is any, glints from the brass instruments and buttons of a military band.

Some recent blurbs: 'We know him as the Renaissance genius.