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“... In his Foreword to a new biography of Anthony Chenevix-Trench,* one-time headmaster of Eton, Sir William Gladstone writes that Trench’s ‘interest was in drawing out the best from boys as individuals’. Another interest, not mentioned by Sir William, lay in drawing down the underpants of boys – as individuals ...”

“... our gaze. The thing we contemplate is not Edmund Kean, his very self and voice, but the Kean of William Hazlitt. The radiance of the report obscures that which is reported. Ms Kelly writes clearly for the most part, seldom with elegance. She gets into some frightful muddles of syntax: ‘Family commitments, among them to her stepson George, an unsuccessful ...”

“... a series of love sonnets which, he declared, were the ‘finest … written in any language since Shakespeare’s’.Despite Elizabeth’s initial protestations, he insisted they should not be kept from the world and a manuscript was sent to their friend Mary Russell Mitford in Reading with instructions to print a very limited number of copies. These slim ...”

“... Reformation, The Stripping of the Altars, they have now made things even with David Daniell’s William Tyndale. Tyndale’s life is soon told. He was born, probably in 1494, of a landowning and entrepreneurial family in that part of Gloucestershire where the Cotswolds meet the Severn, since then the home of Evelyn Waugh (temporarily: the ghost of Tyndale ...”

“... a much more potent and present threat to English religion and government. The intelligence agent William Herle wrote that Philip II, the king of Spain, hated English Protestants ‘with an immortal hatred never to be reconciled, esteeming them worse than either Turks, Marranos, Jews, or Infidels, the blasphemers of God’s holy name and of his son Jesus ...”

“... from the psychological dimension?’Giorgio Agamben, The End of the PoemThere is a moment​ in William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity when he decides to linger in Macbeth’s mind. The future killer is trying to convince himself that murder might be not so bad a crime (for the criminal) if he could just get it over with. This is about as unreal as a ...”

“... seal his reputation, in 1617. He was not alive when it was published: he died on the same day as Shakespeare in 1616. Such, in brief, are the facts about the author of Don Quixote. Like most men and women before the 17th century, he has left us no letters, no diaries, none of that wealth of material which makes the life of a Keats or a Kafka so ...”

“... England there was nothing. The absence of English Scriptures helps explain the great impact that William Tyndale’s English translations, first of the New Testament and then of substantial parts of the Old, had on the country in the 1520s and 1530s. His New Testaments, printed on the Continent, were bought up by the Bishop of London, who had them burned in ...”

“... The three figures about whom Stubbs has most to say, the poets Sir John Suckling, Thomas Carew and William Davenant, do to varying degrees answer to that description. Though his book makes no claims to archival discovery, it lights up their writing and brings fresh perception to the ties of friendship between them, to their travels and adventures and ...”

“... going on for ever – backwards or forwards from The Waste Land, from Chaucer to Spenser and Shakespeare and Donne, through Milton and Blake and Keats, to David Jones, Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, to Lee Harwood’s Cable Street, Bill Griffiths’s Whitechapel and Brian Catling’s The Stumbling Block. London infected its ...”

“... rather welcome.For instance, there was a book called Road to Survival, by an American soil expert, William Vogt, which said the Chinese were certain to starve to death because they bred like rabbits and didn’t farm properly, and I put into my selection everything he said about China. Before long this book was denounced by name by Mao Tse-tung in person, and ...”

“... on screens. When it comes to the transmission of elite status from one generation to the next, Shakespeare or Plato no longer has the same cachet as economics or physics.Moral​ panics about ‘political correctness’ date back to the 1970s and early 1980s, when there was no mandated national curriculum, and conservatives could entertain paranoid ...”

“... than on his ear. This is Hazlitt’s way of avoiding claptrap; he’s pleased, for instance, that Shakespeare ‘did not sacrifice the truth of his own sensations to the demands of measure, or the harmony of cadences. He spoke to the heart, not to the ear.’ So although Hazlitt’s prose often has an almost audible pluck and daring, a relish for the cut and ...”

“... into a kind of luxury that seems foreign to its intentions. The Doves Press books – volumes of Shakespeare, the Bible, Milton: not hard texts to come by – were monuments to literature. The Eragny books ask that you turn their few pages: the Doves books rest in hermetic magnificence while you read the paperback. In his introductory note to the Kelmscott ...”

“... of Ugolino) gnaws at the head of Margaret Thatcher. In 2010 Terry produced a postmodern rewrite of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, where notes by editors, bits from newspapers and Shakespeareish phrases are mashed up with Joysprick: ‘Not marcasite nor the gilded moolvees/Of the Prince of Darkness shall outlive this powerful rhythm and blues.’ Sonnet 50 (in which ...”