“... prose again’. And this is also why Bentley’s Milton was the graveyard of his method. As both Christopher Ricks and William Empson recognised, Bentley had a remarkable ability to spot the poetically dazzling in Milton. The trouble was he would then emend it away. When Milton’s devils smelt gold from ore, Milton says they ‘scumm’d the bullion ...”

“... Poet of Sonnet 86 remains George Chapman, not, as some think, Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson or, since his was assuredly an ‘alien pen’ (Sonnet 78), Torquato Tasso. Candidates for the doubtful honour of being the Dark Lady are discussed (so far as the list went in 1970) and a slight preference is registered for Mary ...”

“... 1591, in the preface to his translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. It could also be comic, as Christopher Marlowe realised when writing his Hero and Leander two years later – a poem which, in describing the beauty of Leander’s body, pairs ‘tell ye’ with ‘belly’.According to Scott-Baumann, the proliferation of feminine rhyme in the work of ...”

“... with Chamberlain, Beatrice Webb and Milner) conspire with the Duc de Mersch (King Leopold of the Belgians) to ‘civilise’ Greenland’s Eskimos. The protagonist of the novel, Arthur Granger, is an aristocratic and unsuccessful novelist who betrays his own cherished chivalric ideals for the sake of a girl-agent from the Fourth ...”

“... de Viau. Atheists were of course blasphemers by definition, and we know from the charges against Christopher Marlowe that, like Théophile, they sometimes larded their tavern conversation with rather juvenile insults to religion – the Virgin was a whore, Christ was a bastard and St John was his bedfellow, and so on. It seems that one somehow needed to ...”

“... may be dubious, it cannot be denied that it yields some interesting insights. Terence Hawkes, Christopher Norris and Jacqueline Rose show how the attempts of some influential Shakespeare critics to reduce the plays to coherent unified structures break down as the gaps and contradictions of the texts are carried over by an uncanny transfer to their own ...”

“... the issue of genre with questions of biography. Given the fates that overtook his colleagues Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd in 1593 and 1594 – the one stabbed to death at 29, the other eventually dying after an extensive and painful interrogation – you could argue that Shakespeare might have felt that he had been living on borrowed time since the ...”

“... of Hermes, Zoroaster and Pythagoras or relations between the later Roman Empire and the Persian king Shapur II, which Angelo Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola and others debated in the new Florentine library of San Marco. Yet they were also – or were supposed to be – places of quiet, intensive study. When the French jurist and antiquarian Claude ...”

“... avant-garde art world Fraser was one of the more worthwhile dealers of his time. According to that king of the métier Leo Castelli, he was ‘a superb dealer’; among leading artists, Richard Hamilton says that ‘Robert’s was the best gallery I knew in London,’ Ellsworth Kelly that ‘he was a very courageous and flamboyant dealer,’ Claes Oldenburg ...”

“... had made the island their home (the French Ministry of Culture’s website still claims that Christopher Columbus ‘discovered the island’); the suppression and expulsion of the island’s Indigenous population in the 17th century; the transfer of enslaved people from Africa to work on sugar cane and coffee plantations; the abolition of slavery in ...”

“... are being brought to bear on Dylan by people who (like Day’s co-editor of the Tennyson MSS, Christopher Ricks) have discovered that what Dylan has to say and his exceptional way of saying it are as responsive to their critical attention as the traditional topics of Eng Lit. The panellists were worried that the ‘romantic outlaw’ tendency would object ...”

“... much is said but because too little. There is nothing on the story in Herodotus of the Egyptian King who sought to discover the true, primal language by bringing up children in isolation and noting their first utterances, nothing on Chaucer’s mysterious (and non-existent?) authority, Lollius, nothing on the greatest example in English of unsubdued ...”

“... the BBC had created (Ted Ray, Billy Cotton and his band, the gramophone record-presenter Christopher Stone), and not only set them off to better advantage but did so in pre-recorded, packaged series that were much more profitable for the performer. In an early demonstration of the dread art of scheduling, the commercial stations also concentrated ...”

“... table, McCullers tinkering manically with The Member of the Wedding. One day he breezed into Christopher Isherwood’s Santa Monica home, and Isherwood was entranced. ‘Tennessee is the most relaxed creature imaginable: he works till he’s tired, eats when he feels like it, sleeps when he can’t stay awake.’ Isherwood went on to describe the park at ...”

“... it makes on the listener. It is literary criticism ‘to the moment’. Like his PhD supervisor, Christopher Ricks, Griffiths is above all an apostle of close reading. He treats the passages he discusses as morally and psychologically instructive as well as semantically subtle. He attends to small details of syntax or diction, but he is also concerned with ...”