“... 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 ...”

“... was established. In his pioneering Othello’s Countrymen (1965), Eldred Jones showed how Shakespeare played upon and subverted associations of blackness and stereotypes of the ‘villainous Moor’ that were widespread in Elizabethan theatre. The pseudoscientific racists of the 18th and 19th centuries were putting old wine into new bottles. The ...”

“... has called the ‘comedy of remarriage’, a subgenre whose touchstones are the late romances of Shakespeare and the Hollywood screwball comedies of the 1930s. (Remarriage need not here be taken literally, though the poems hint at some ordinary turbulence: ‘Because our hiatus is on hiatus,’ like Shakespeare’s ...”

“... pantomime fairy queen always talks in bad rhyming couplets, and always has done since the time of Shakespeare. The difficulty was to get it into the head of the student actress, whose natural dignity was otherwise splendid for the part, that she really must look at the Queen and address her unofficially and as if otherwise unheard – they are secretly ...”

“... by the idea that you could find enough traces, or indeed direct evidence, in the work of, say, Shakespeare and Marlowe and Bacon to declare them, too, part of the gay tradition, the secret dotted line that runs right through Western literature. Yet, like most writers, Borges was obsessed with what came before him, with the books and writers ...”

“... quoted by Friedman said of his students that ‘you can’t always be sure they’ve read Shakespeare, but you know they’ve read Erikson.’ The last quarter-century after that was, inevitably, a period of decline. Though apparently quite a modest man, once he had attained the position of sage his ideas grew thinner and his prose flabbier. At birth ...”

“... he is no more original on Scottish nationalism than the title of one of his previous biographies, William Wallace: Brave Heart, would suggest. (His introduction, for example, parrots the lament that ‘the Scots share with the Basques and the Kurds the unenviable distinction of being a nation without having a sovereign, independent state,’ while failing to ...”

“... point Milton is willing to ravish the senses rather than simply to suspect them. In Young Milton William Poole describes the 1645 volume as ‘a curious cacophony of radical and conservative voices, anxious to promote both his precocity and prophecy’. That seems exactly right: in this volume potentiality exceeds certainty, and that makes it exciting. It is ...”

“... busy writing prose at the same time. He was a compulsive letter-writer and his enormous study of Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, began from a series of letters he wrote to the theatre director Donya Feuer. His other important prose work is the collection of essays and reviews that make up Winter ...”

“... point of all discussion, was inculcated by 19th-century Orientalists: the translator and scholar William Jones called Kalidasa, the greatest Indian poet and dramatist of antiquity, the ‘Shakespeare of the East’. To do this, Jones had to reverse history – Kalidasa preceded ...”

“... triumphant eclecticism’. Among the figures he mentions are, of course, Anquetil-Duperron and Sir William Jones, the founder of Indology, whose researches on the Orient, Hinduism and the Sanskrit language include translations from – and, in effect, the recovery of – the great fourth-century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa. Yet Said is hard on Jones – ‘whereas ...”

“... 1971 by R.C. Latham and W. Matthews (designated thus on the cover, but becoming Robert Latham and William Matthews on the title-page). If some books are classifiable as blockbusters, these 11 stout volumes are more of a Thames barrage. The last two of them, the Companion and Index, were the sole responsibility of Robert Latham, who died this year (Professor ...”

“... On the jacket of Playing the Game is a portrait of the man who played it: a portrait by William Strang (1859-1921), a Late Victorian artist now much undervalued. He did what is by far the best portrait of Hardy, and his special ability seems to have lain in pleasing his subjects and their public by making them look suitably grave and important, even a shade portentous, while at the same time revealing hidden traces of weakness, perhaps of meanness ...”

“... of Architecture came out in 1849. By the time he met Ruskin seven years later, he was a friend of William Morris and the junior Pre-Raphaelites and destined for a career bound up though never identifiable with their circle. From the beginning there is a wary sobriety about Webb, at variance with the antics and impulsiveness of Morris and Rossetti. Some of ...”

“... or two to a former lover, Gertrude Buckman, a sentence to George Santayana and two sentences to William Carlos Williams. Of these communications, those to Bishop, Buckman and Williams are certified as ‘written during an acute manic episode’, but the others are not. A few days later everything again becomes manic for a while. How likely is it that the ...”