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“... naval officer striated with pride, it came to seem, if reports are true, like a life sentence. William Shawcross, in his expertly genuflecting biography of the queen mother, shows us a Duke of Edinburgh just after his wedding, a young man in love writing to his mother-in-law of the new unity he has just achieved and hopes will bless the future. ‘Lilibet ...”

“... actually, in the days of scrolls and tablets: what is the Bible if not a self-help manual? William Caxton got in on the act early enough with The Game and Play of Chess Moralised (1474), a book which aimed to make people better than they used to be, not by bringing their souls nearer to God, but by bringing their pawns closer to the king, which many ...”

“... early music came about – in short, of how works were collected into a canon – is addressed by William Weber in The Rise of Musical Classics in 18th-century England. Strictly, the classics did not rise: the notion was invented, as Weber notes. Public music in England (tabors, crumhorns and shawms apart) began with commercially managed concerts in the ...”

“... Through Linnell, who was his friend and patron and later his father-in-law, Palmer met William Blake. It was the light of Blake and of the old prints Linnell pointed him towards – in particular those of Dürer, Lucas van Leyden and Bonasone – that showed Palmer the path out of the pit of modernity.Palmer and his friends, meeting together in ...”

“... before he died in 1922, John Butler Yeats wrote an angry, defensive letter to his eldest son William. W.B. Yeats had published a memoir in the Dial and his father objected to the almost parenthetical mention in one episode of an ‘enraged’ Yeats family. The remark unleashed in him a long-restrained irritation, prompting an impassioned defence of his ...”

“... leave the excavation site. The earlier period of Mackenzie and Scott needs more attention, and William Taylor of Norwich and the increasing company of provincial Dissenting students of German are too quickly dismissed; the large band of translators of Schiller (apart from Coleridge) is unaccountably ignored. The scholars of the Classics, philosophy and ...”

“... is that the wrong side won on 14 October 1066: Anglo-Saxon England was more civilised than William’s Normandy. William had no moral or legal claim to the throne. Harold, by contrast, was the last English king for more than 600 years to owe his crown ‘to the will of the people’. ...”

“... death’s dateless night. Room: ‘The dedication suggests a quotation.’ And that’s true too. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, actually. An editor ought to rise to an occasional session of sweet silent thought, or even to the consulting of a concordance. Robert Browning, Luria, 1846 – I dedicate this last attempt for the present at Dramatic Poetry to a ...”

“... first lines and couplets is remarkable, but she rarely keeps things up. She is in good company: Shakespeare when writing a sonnet also takes a perfect swallow dive, and scrambles out somehow in the final couplet as if its awkwardness amused him after the thoughtless pleasure of that first leap. Dryden is also a jumper in, a superb starter. What about the ...”

“... combining the vitality of Fuseli’s libidinous acrobats with the pearly translucence and sheen of William Etty’s bottom-heavy models. Mid-19th-century paintings of fairies are also distinguished by a disregard for orthodox spatial organisation and by a compositional intricacy which is often deliberately bewildering. The eye-aching effects of The Fairy ...”

“... Irish poet, though most of the time it might seem odd to insist that Dante was a great Italian, or Shakespeare a great English, poet, partly because we vaguely think of them as transcending nationality. But Yeats was the necessary great poet of the national cultural renaissance that accompanied a struggle for political independence with which he was inevitably ...”

“... time, of any time’. Eliot’s essay marked the tercentenary of the death of a contemporary of Shakespeare, who between 1588 and his death had been successively or simultaneously vicar of St Giles Cripplegate; master of Pembroke College, Cambridge; prebendary of St Paul’s; dean of Westminster; and bishop of Chichester, Ely and, finally, Winchester. What ...”

“... as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the capacity to endure pre-arranged physical hardship. Their version, no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with ...”

“... of the problem Scott experienced when writing Marmion. Old college friends wanted him to emulate Shakespeare, Milton or Dryden. ‘Noble female admirers flattered him towards elegant drawing-room verse.’ His comrades in the Light Horse Cavalry wanted war-songs, political Londoners wanted verse satire. ‘Ballantyne wanted bestsellers – poems that would ...”

“... it has itself become an object of study (there is, for example, an Open University textbook called Shakespeare, Aphra Behn and the Canon). Within the academy, Behn’s work has been the subject of several international conferences, a substantial annotated bibliography of criticism, another biography (by Angeline Goreau) and a newly revised edition of ...”