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“... The subtitle of James Shapiro’s engaging new book is a tease. Shapiro, the author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), is in no doubt that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon is the author of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have been proposed since the mid-19th century ...”

“... gods, of genos, race, kind and offspring – is one of the great feats of the human imagination: a vast collection of stories, both intimate and cosmic, that bind the living to the dead and to one another, the past to the present and the present to what is to come. It is a primal work of culture, ...”

“... Some years ago, the novelist David Foster Wallace submitted himself to a long television interview with Charlie Rose, the PBS chat-show host. It was a terrific performance, and in it Wallace talked about why, in much of his work, narrative is split into body-text and footnotes: There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in ...”

“... Briefly during the second act Michael Frayn’s stage-play, Make and Break, transcends its setting, a Frankfurt trade fair, touching on a general gloom. Mrs Rogers is treating Garrard, a goatish sales rep, to the fruits of Buddhism. It is late in the day ...”

“... really photographic rather than architectural (and spatial)? And would such ‘contamination’ be a bad thing? Is it possible that the buildings themselves are complicitous, no longer offering the grand head-on, Neoclassical façades for simple reproduction (see, for example, the magnificent Richard Pare collection, Photography and Architecture ...”

“... off into one of his self-intoxicating fantasies. We were there together in the mid-Sixties to make a film for the BBC, and although I had forewarned him, Jonathan couldn’t believe that this overstuffed furniture, this aviary of china birds, these chiming clocks, garish oriental rugs and draped curtains could form the chosen, or ...”

“... John Updike’s unfailing geniality and fluent industry appear to get on a fair number of nerves, of which he’s slyly aware. (Is there anything he isn’t slyly aware of? That foxy grin conceals volumes.) When Updike was but a sprig, apprenticing at the New Yorker and carving out a little piece of Pennsylvania as his literary duchy, his gleaming facility was found suspect by some detractors, its satin finish the imposture of a fair-haired boy out to impress his elders with the fine flick of his exquisite perceptions and deflective modesty ...”

“... questions apparently consists of anagrams of playwrights. Mine is Annabel Tent. Nobody guesses it.A joke about the Queen Mother who in an old people’s home finds herself not treated with the proper respect. She approaches a nurse:QM: Don’t you know who I ...”

“... more satisfying than works. They can grow and change without limit, and, lacking the certainty of a completed thing, will never entirely disappoint. James Agee had a fortunate career on the face of it, as a New York freelance for almost two decades and then ...”

“... Bill Emmott, the former editor of the Economist, writes that ‘the fear now is of being present at the destruction' of the ‘West’, the ‘world’s most successful political idea’. Edward Luce, for example, a Financial Times columnist based in Washington DC, isn’t sure ‘whether the Western way of life, and our ...”

“... Nobody ever claimed that he was clever. Later on, exasperated chroniclers denounced him as ‘simple-minded’, ‘senseless’ and ‘useless’ – simplex, insipiens, inutilis. After his dismal performance at the battle of Saintes in 1242, his bitterest enemy, Simon de Montfort, said to his face: ‘It would be ...”

“... of the Holy Roman Emperor and heir to the Castilian throne, lay dying. The prince had been chasing a maid down a flight of stairs when he fell and hit the back of his head. He was taken to bed, weak and feverish, and his condition quickly deteriorated. His wound became infected, his head became swollen and he grew ...”

“... Neville Brody is advertised as the most influential graphic designer of his generation, which means something in a Britain where we have at last found what we are really good at: charming money out of each other ...”

“... As Amersham achieves Privatisation And sells the way hot cakes do when dirt cheap We realise with a sickening sensation, As of a skier on a slope too steep, That if the soundest firms owned by the nation Are flogged, the duds are all we’ll get to keep – And when the auction ends they’ll sell the hammer ...”

“... All literary works are anonymous, but some are more anonymous than others. It is in the nature of a piece of writing that it is able to stand free of its begetter, and can dispense with his or her physical presence. In this sense, writing is more like an adolescent than a toddler ...”