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“... 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 ...”

“... We know​ a gratifying amount about William Byrd, partly thanks to quite recent archival rediscoveries, and Kerry McCarthy splendidly and concisely presents it all in this intelligent and affectionate biography. Alas, the one thing we don’t have is a contemporary portrait, not even anything as clumsy as the universally recognisable dome-headed icon of Shakespeare: the portrait-image of Byrd adorning CD sleeves and scores is an unimaginative Georgian-Tudor pastiche ...”

“... Speranza is another foreign novel that may remind us of British genre-parody – especially William Golding’s Rites of Passage, that witty, near-sadistic parody of traditional seafaring yarns. Like Golding’s novel, Speranza begins with the journal of a healthy, self-satisfied, idealistic young gentleman enjoying an adventurous voyage and uttering ...”

“... surprise, excitement, mystery and catharsis. E.M. Forster was wrong to deprecate the ‘story’. Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoevsky had no such misgivings. Does this mean ceasing to discriminate between literature and yarns? Professor James Naremore, in Professor Bernard Benstock’s symposium, seems to imply that it does. Dashiell Hammett, he ...”

“... Their friends included the ageing Radical John Bright and Elizabeth Gaskell’s widower, William. But smart society was closed to them and this was something that Beatrix’s mother, Helen, seems to have minded deeply. A grim-faced little woman, she apparently occupied herself entirely with a round of calls and with ordering and re-ordering her ...”

“... perhaps to re-create the disorientation of the senses recommended by Rimbaud and diagnosed by William James. The groupuscule we call the Beats (short for ‘beatitude’) was by 1961 geographically and emotionally scattered: Kerouac (barely present in Baker’s book) hunkered down at his mother’s house, Burroughs cocooned himself in Tangier, Neal ...”

“... figures on his pottery, while Dr Bowdler cleaned up Roman and Greek classics, along with Chaucer, Shakespeare and the Bible. There were, from the start, problems about this definition of the 19th century as ‘other’, squeezed in between the age of the Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism, and our own progressive, libertarian age, when freedom of ...”

“... that image of ‘the poet’ their own philosophical and political attitudes. It is a truism that Shakespeare’s multitudinous world is a kind of mirror, in which all who gaze can find their own preoccupations and individualities. But Dante’s case is different. It is the organisation of his poetry itself that produces counter-organisations, radically ...”

“... together in such spectacular fashion. Indeed, the 1994 Channel Tunnel follows the same route (from Shakespeare Cliff to Sangatte) and the same design (two separate rail tunnels, joined by transverse ‘cross-passage’ communication tunnels) as the tunnel which was promoted in the late 19th century by Edward Watkin of the Southeastern Railway Company and his ...”

“... the crusaders of Tasso, the irony of Cervantes, and, most remarkable of all, the fact that ‘Shakespeare borrowed and reshaped a lot from medieval narrative.’ We turn the page again and find that Eco is concerned to distinguish the different dreams of the Middle Ages entertained by modern man. No 7 reads as follows: ‘The Middle Ages of ...”

“... of Jesus. He goes in for Morris dancing, you know. I’ve seen him with bells on his legs.’ ‘William Empson, gentlemen. Seldom seen out of pubs.’ ‘There is not a single living man of letters with less moral courage than Thomas Stearns Eliot.’ He was theatrical, with bushy raised eyebrows, a fondness for dramatic pauses and a way of literally ...”

“... continued in the 18th century the joke about its becoming a kind of homeland of the mad that Shakespeare had offered in 1604. The joke had been of course the gravedigger’s, that Hamlet’s madness would be invisible in England, because ‘there the men are as mad as he.’ It’s quite rightly a frogmarch, maybe even a toad’s march, to Pseud’s ...”

“... maps, full of trends and lines of force but most of the actual place-names missed out. I remember William Empson devising an Outline of Outlines, reduced in the end to a single sentence: ‘Everything is pretty all right because of science.’ Where are they now? Sunk back into the vast ocean of superannuated enlightenment. If we are to find the origins of ...”

“... The turn away from poetry began (Honan implies) with the marriage of ‘K’ to the uncongenial William Forster in 1850 and Arnold’s own marriage immediately afterwards. Arnold evidently came to his marriage bed pure, apart from some heart-lusting after the blue-eyed Marguerite and therapeutic masturbation (faithfully chronicled by Cecil Lang from ...”

“... time Thomas Hardy arrived in the city, already trained as an architect whose sympathies lay with William Morris (‘we are only trustees for those who come after’), the rebuilding of Rome, now the confident capital of Italy, had torn away the ancient fabric, leaving no space for accretions, whether of flora or of association. The shaggy figures of ...”