“... do it with “reserved” English good taste.’ The best idea was to ham it ‘like a provincial Shakespeare a hundred years ago’. According to Naomi Lewis this resulted in his ‘presenting his love poems in the sardonic tones of a 17th-century New England elder directing the trial of a witch’. Haffenden describes Empson’s as ‘a patrician ...”

“... Van Dine’s famous aesthete-sleuth – polo player, expert in Chinese ceramics, former student of William James – whom Raymond Chandler regarded as ‘the most asinine character in detective fiction’, and on some level that’s probably the point. (‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance,’ Marlowe says later on.) Even so, it’s surprising that ...”

“... chief priest, long filled by Maynard Mack. Professor Mack remains active: he published a book on Shakespeare last spring, and his recent lectures typically begin with a variant on the modesty trope that Pope would have appreciated – a claim to senility couched in language so witty as instantly to disprove itself. Still, eight years after the publication of ...”

“... be called the allegorical import of the novel, Ernest then walks home by way of Waverley Street, Shakespeare Street and Milton Street. Sillitoe throws in a thumbnail sketch of the historical George Psalmanazar, the notable 18th-century liar who composed a fake history of Formosa and a fake grammar of its language (which he was thereupon hired to teach to ...”

“... and letters belonging to Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Lincoln. The German botanist William Hertrich was commissioned to design the gardens: Californian, Australian, Japanese, Chinese, Jungle, Palm, Rose and Desert; a maze of meandering pathways across 120 acres. They hold more than four thousand species of cacti and succulents, a thousand ...”

“... my father.This passage is very close indeed to the translation in the Matthew Bible of 1537 (by William Tyndale) and there are just two differences from the King James Bible of 1611 (‘evil occurrent’ in place of ‘any evil plague’; ‘purpose’ for ‘am determined’). But this version is from the Great Bible of 1539-40, ‘the Bible appointed to ...”

“... Thies gets a disability pension. The incongruities are similar in kind to performances of Shakespeare that make Troilus a yuppie investment broker or offer a version of Othello in Victorian dress. It would be wrong to think them symbolic, or otherwise meaningful. Ransmayr, like some Shakespearean producers, is just having fun. The most interesting ...”

“... Temple of Apollo’ after Claude Lorrain by William Woollett (1760) Among various unforgettable moments in a life much of which has been spent thinking about landscape in literature and the visual arts was a remark made ten years ago by Kirsty Wark in the programme which follows Newsnight on Fridays, in which she was chairing a discussion of the Gainsborough exhibition then at Tate Britain ...”

“... who in the mid-12th century tried to foster in their church the cult of a Norwich boy called William, who had died under mysterious circumstances, allegedly at the hands of the Jews. The story was that in such murders, Jews got together to re-enact Christ’s crucifixion on a Christian young enough to be nearly as innocent as his saviour, and used his ...”

“... may be most valuable to students of the theatre and of spectacle. They describe in detail how Shakespeare was performed by Kean and Kemble, the sweetness and the tragic power of Giuditta Pasta’s voice, the marvellous imitation of morning mist in a London pantomime, a performance by Billy the rat-killing dog. The high art is not always easy to ...”

“... against the liberal Enlightenment, a politics from which this volume is not light-years remote. William Blake thought that art should not be too obvious in case it fell into the rationalist trap of false transparency; but he was also quick to see how cults of mystery were exploited by both priest and king to legitimate their power. There is no reason to ...”

“... Wordsworth was not too much on his dignity, Lamb was not too drunk. The talk was of Milton and Shakespeare, Voltaire and Newton. Lamb and Keats agreed that Newton had ‘destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow’ and the company drank a famous toast: ‘Newton’s health and confusion to mathematics.’ Above them towered Haydon’s huge unfinished canvas ...”

“... all in the literary-prize-winning league, tell us of areas with which we are probably unfamiliar. William Kennedy’s Ironweed is about Albany, capital of the State of New York. Julian Barnes writes about the France of Gustave Flaubert, as discussed in an irrational, pedantic manner by a British admirer of Flaubert’s work. Anita Desai, daughter of a German ...”

“... failings). Herbert Coleridge is rescued from obscurity; there are footnotes about the omnivore William Buckland, who found mole more disagreeable to eat than bluebottle, and Arthur Munby, known no longer for his poetry but for his oddity of sexual taste. But the famous Furnivall predominates, seen in ‘goatish contentment’ with waitresses, in political ...”

“... opened in Lambeth in 1852 in a squalid pub said to have been frequented by Burbage, Jonson and Shakespeare, and the institution, which had its heart across the river in the East End of London and soon spread throughout the provinces, reached its zenith in the 1890s. The respectable Victorian entrepreneurs who ran the theatres, Major remarks, were not in ...”