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“... idea is being repeated, which brings out the change of tone in this verse.Madge is reading from William Empson’s first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), which she refers to only as ‘the horrible ambiguity book’. Paton Walsh read English at Oxford in the 1950s, and Goldengrove is in many ways a response to the experience. Madge wants to be a ...”

“... dilettante establishment that refused to take Hitchcock seriously. Unfortunately, he kept invoking Shakespeare as proof that a popular artist can be great – great though he may be, Hitchcock isn’t much like Shakespeare. Houston, for her part, cited the director himself in support of her argument against his auteurist ...”

“... likened Germany to Hamlet, a comparison instantly understood in a country that had come to regard Shakespeare as one of its own. Germans knew all about des Gedankens Blässe – the pale cast of thought. Others played on the same theme. For Heinrich Heine the Germans reigned supreme only ‘in the realm of dreams’; Marx sneered that they had only thought ...”

“... voice let everyone immediately know that he was an American,’ George Whitman, the owner of the Shakespeare Bookshop in Paris, recently recalled. He never turned into one of those phoney American artists around town. Henry was a native American first, although he considered American air-conditioning a nightmare. He never pal’d around with the ...”

“... stacks, Doug, half-naked and on the run from a mob of siblings, gets directions from his brother William: Take your first right through Minor Elizabethan Drama. Comedies will appear on your left and tragedies will be on your right. Keep going past Ralph Roister Doister and The Spanish Tragedy. About three shelves after Gorboduc, you’ll come to a narrow ...”

“... six years before while supervising a Work Projects Administration programme. She had had a copy of William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain at the corner of her desk, which she had bought so she’d have something to read on the long subway ride to and from work. The couple had a son, Paul, in 1943, a musical prodigy and now a well-known violinist and ...”

“... tall, graceful buildings contain e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.Eliot cast the longest shadow on the mid-century generation, not simply because of the brilliance of the poetry and essays: he was both the model and the anti-model for the New Criticism (espoused by Lowell and Jarrell’s teachers John ...”

“... The story goes that, on the day when William Empson moved into Magdalene College, Cambridge, to take up a fellowship, his suitcases (as was the custom in those days) were unpacked by one of the college servants. The gyp was so shocked by the contents of Empson’s bags that he decided to report him to the college authorities ...”

“... clear. Hence the liturgical use of incense.The literary critic Caroline Spurgeon once argued that Shakespeare had an acute sense of smell and was particularly sensitive to the bad odours of unwashed humanity and decaying corpses. He almost certainly shared Coriolanus’s disgust for the ‘rank-scented many’ and their ‘stinking breaths’. Conversely, his ...”

“... it were sentenced to instant execution. But to say incoherent is not always to say inexplicable. William Calley, known to his commanding officer (evidently an early aficionado of Catch-22) as Lieutenant Shithead, finally faced a court martial for the massacre by his platoon in 1968 of the population of the Vietnamese village of My Lai. He was convicted and ...”

“... long been studied, often with the aim of separating authentic from corrupt texts of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. On that foundation there has been built what the late Don McKenzie, a leading inspiration in the history of the book, called ‘the sociology of texts’. Scholars have inspected habits of reading and writing; standards of ...”

“... lonely schoolboy from Christ’s Hospital. Through his study of the scientific work, Levere joins William Empson among others in defending the coherence of Coleridge and his metaphysics. Coleridge’s vision of a ‘dynamic’ German philosophy, pitted against Anglo-Gallic reductionism; his flirtation with chemistry ‘to improve his stock of ...”

“... Replying in 1934 to a Japanese poet who had asked for advice about writing ‘modern’ poetry, William Empson recommended ‘verse with a variety of sorts of feeling in it . . . it might be a good thing to try to show the clash of different philosophies, and social comedy, and quote lines of poetry by people quite different from you that you have thought especially good ...”

“... draw on Pound’s Imagism, while linking of the frustrated love of the 18th-Century Gaelic poet William Ross to ‘the Audiart who plagued De Born’ glances to the Pound of ‘Na Audiart’ and The Spirit of Romance. More illuminating is MacLean’s orientation towards Eliot. It was the spell of Grierson and Eliot which drew him to Donne, whom both critics ...”

“... Though some very civil views are expressed about the Bible there is nothing from that work itself. Shakespeare has four or five indifferent lines. Keats is represented by his prose and an obscurely naughty joke he is said to have passed on about the female pudenda. At heart, Mr Murphy seems to be a serious-minded man and he concentrates on the writings of the ...”