“... 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 ...”

“... Westminster Bridge at its own reflection in the water, which turns out to have the features of William Shakespeare. The reference is to a mock-solemn claim by Amis that ‘in two hundred years I want them to be talking about Dante, Shakespeare and Martin Amis.’ The text of the Time Out feature by Richard ...”

“... who is probably 35 but perhaps 33 (736). He is not really interested in the domestic life of Shakespeare except that Shakespeare, at 18, married a woman eight or nine years older, already pregnant. Stephen is 22. Early in the book, when he is yearning for love on a beach (49), he expects the woman to take the ...”

“... behind straggly beards and whiskers with sad, rheumy eyes – Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Swinburne, William Morris, Leslie Stephen, Tennyson – giving off a steamy despair. They had heard the melancholy long withdrawing roar of faith, and they did not like the sound of it. Today relegated to a wall in a side room, these literary men seem to take second billing ...”

“... For Oberon, Titania, Puck and their company in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are Middle Spirits; Shakespeare calls them fairies, Empson proposes, ‘to disarm the resistance of the spectators’, that is, to lure them by means of homely popular culture into a more dangerous world of heterodox speculation. Such speculation extends beyond the air speed of ...”

“... odd. Hadn’t it always just, well, existed? Surely, at his Stratford grammar school, the lad Shakespeare mugged up his Chaucer, if not the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and Pride and Prejudice like the rest of us? How otherwise could he have written plays full of ‘characters’ who, as all O and A-level candidates ...”

“... verse shape that almost all literate people would be able to identify, if only through having seen Shakespeare’s ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’ printed in the order of service at weddings. Most people of a certain age could recite a sonnet or two by Wilfred Owen, or Keats, or Shakespeare. How did this ...”

“... thus crucial to the whole story of the English 15th-century monarchy. This was well appreciated by Shakespeare, and Henry has a central role in three of the history plays, Richard II and Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2. For all that, Shakespeare does not give Henry much more than a pasteboard personality, clearly seeing more ...”

“... and disdain. Thomas, who seemed small and effeminate, particularly beside his fierce brother William, was bound in early life to seek for love elsewhere: in a landscape, or in literature. It is, one might say, the old story. When the father died, his family became itinerant, shepherded by the cold mother. They went to Bath, where Thomas started to reveal ...”

“... with the laughter. Also the sense of huge verbal labour in them, which is always contrasted with Shakespeare’s agility and flow. This note is already sounded by Dryden, who styles Jonson the Virgil of English drama to Shakespeare’s Homer, and adds tellingly: ‘I admire him, but I love ...”

“... York, where, increasingly desperate to crack the cipher, he enlisted the cryptographic skills of William Newbold, a professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania, who spent years studying the manuscript under a microscope and came to believe that the glyphs concealed a second cipher – microletters encoded into each penstroke. Voynich was elated. ‘When the time ...”

“... Eliot; some Bob Dylan; Samuel Johnson; much dazzle and many jokes; Keats-Byron-Tennyson-Dryden-Shakespeare-Beckett-Hill running giddily into each other; but each writer and observation given its space to illuminate and be illuminated into a radiant energy, which conveys, above all, that literature matters and that it also matters to get everything as right ...”

“... much that France still offers. There are writers he likes, most of them dead: Ronsard, John Clare, William Barnes (‘love of whose poems seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my contemporaries’), George Herbert, Vaughan, Crabbe, Hopkins, Whitman, Campion, Morris, Christina Rossetti, John Crowe Ransom, Wyndham Lewis, Louis ...”

“... schools by the age of 13. This would be in 1799 or 1800. While still at the schools he came across William Godwin, then running his ill-starred children’s books business. For Godwin he made a number of illustrations: the cuts for the first edition of the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare are his Godwin wrote a little book ...”