“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... then barks: ‘Don’t hold that against me! I’m a little screwy myself!’ A few months later, William Powell and Myrna Loy appeared in W.S. Van Dyke’s The Thin Man (1934) as Nick and Nora Charles, a high-society couple who solve a murder together. Powell is an exaggerated Gable (sleepier eyes, twitchier mouth), so droll and fluid he makes Gable seem ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Britain to begin with. England especially was late to take an interest. There are no druids in Shakespeare, not even in Cymbeline. Michael Drayton repeatedly mentions them, but uses both the ‘horrid sacrificer’ and ‘wise philosopher’ images impartially. Milton seems to have first welcomed them as sagacious fellow poets, but then either caught up ...”

“... to the left of the headword. Murray’s successors William Craigie and Charles Onions tussled over whether to maintain this practice. Proofs of the Supplement dated 11 September 1929 retain Murray’s so-called tramlines; in the next proofs, dated 2 July 1930, they are gone. Between these dates, Onions joined the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, where he became acutely aware of the prejudices that led some people to stigmatise new or imported terms; tramlines, he felt, didn’t help ...”

“... 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 ...”