“... Scandinavia, as Heather O’Donoghue points out, for a hundred years before that. Just the same, Shakespeare, for instance, can’t have known anything at all about Norse myth. Hamlet may, as O’Donoghue claims, go back to the story of Frodi’s mill and the giantess-slaves who grind at a magic stone there, as told in one of the few Eddic poems outside the ...”

“... Stuart’ tells the story of the descendant of Henry VII, forcibly separated from her husband, William Seymour, because of both parties’ threatening proximity to the throne. Hemans has Lady Arabella imprisoned and hallucinating, and what is remarkable in the poem is the way in which dreaming, remembering and hallucinating become confused. ‘Twas but a ...”

“... a riskiness about it that we don’t associate with the New Criticism. Unless of course we count William Empson as belonging to the school despite himself (he hated its axiomatic claim that ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art’) since his early criticism ...”

“... story is told with awe, the way stories are told about saints and prophets, or holy kings in Shakespeare – kings like Duncan and Edward the Confessor in Macbeth, Lincoln’s favourite play. Vidal’s novel is largely about the way in which Lincoln became an image of ‘greatness’ to his people. Among British readers of this patriotic American book ...”

“... and your sister.’ Stuck in this enforced, accompanied solitude, Wordsworth turned to writing. ‘William works hard,’ Dorothy reported, ‘but not very much in German.’ He worked with the utter absorption that would always mark his greatest periods of self-discovery, and not for the first time Dorothy worried that the strain of making verses was making ...”

“... he was impressed by Flemish painting. Later he studied at Ghent and in the Antwerp Academy. Unlike William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or Edward Burne-Jones, Brown profited from a broad and thorough education in the business of painting. Later, his art became a passion and a vocation. But it never ceased to be a job from which a living had somehow to be ...”

“... leads him to not even discuss ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, because its account of William Zanzinger’s murder of the slantingly-described black woman, Hattie Carroll, is not obvious, cannot obviously be cited as part of the backdrop. Dylan is brilliant in allowing poetic space, in his songs, for hints and clues to be followed, and this starts ...”

“... Helena Jane and me pack’d in the Family Coach, with Mary Lawless, Mary Smith, Blanchois, and William in another carriage, driving full speed, nine Irish Adventurers, to the French dominions.’ Two at least of these Irish adventurers were as ready as William Wordsworth had been a decade earlier to feel what bliss it ...”

“... only respectable enthusiasm, his love of the arts. Emma Hart was in Rome and about to marry Sir William Hamilton: in the nick of time, just as her looks were on the turn from voluptuous to blowsy. Kauffman painted her as Thalia, the Muse of Comedy, holding a theatrical mask which she appears to be in the act of removing, though to some minds she might have ...”

“... pieces together Mallock’s words to produce other writers’ lines. So there is Donne and Shakespeare, but also lines from books that in 1892 had not yet been written. Versions of E.M. Forster’s ‘only connect’ (Howards End, 1910) pop up throughout: ‘merely connect’; ‘closely connect’; ‘oddly connect’; ‘My little muse was connect ...”

“... religion with poetry, even at the cost of his own ability to write it; the younger sons, Tom and William, struggling, in New Zealand and India respectively, both to avoid the world and yet somehow also politically to change it. As William Arnold’s fine novel Oakfield shows, the terrible question of duty that the father ...”

“... and the police – rather than aesthetic concerns. As early as 1844, the poet and newspaperman William Cullen Bryant had proposed a large public park for New York, and the state legislature had bought the land in 1853, at a time when it could hardly be deemed central to anything, since it was several miles from the existing city in lower Manhattan. The job ...”

“... detail, so often inconsistent, that no one has ever speculated that he wrote the works of Shakespeare’. That perverse distinction has of course been conferred on Coke’s would-be nemesis, Francis Bacon, of whom the historian A.L. Morton wrote in The English Utopia:There is perhaps no great English writer whose personality is less attractive than ...”

“... stirrup. He rode on almost in blindness.’ Pearce is a man of some culture – he reads Dante and Shakespeare, thinks of Odysseus as he travels home – but the lineaments of his experiences may be typical of those ‘BOR’s’ who served in the colonies during the war. And his lack of liberal sympathy may have one merit: for it is perhaps a further ...”

“... Paul Richter, who invented the term ‘doppelgänger’; Schlegel, for whom, as for Coleridge, Shakespeare was a Proteus, and who wrote that dualism ‘is rooted so deeply in our consciousness that even when we are, or at least think ourselves, alone, we still think as two, and are constrained as it were to recognise our inmost profoundest being as ...”