“... resolved satisfactorily. The poems contained in Riding Lights evidently spring from a knowledge of Shakespeare and the great Metaphysicals, to which a touch of Thomas and a smack of Empson have been added for modernity’s sake. The effort to be colourful at all costs leads to such expressions as ‘the dank grass is tangled with the song / Squirmed from a ...”

“... annotated throughout. This would seem to be more evidence, if more is needed, that a lot of Shakespeare has been inadequately annotated – whether because editors are more interested, on the one hand, in establishing a text, and, on the other hand, in writing long introductions explaining what the play is about, than they are in explaining what ...”

“... when at school? In Surprised by Joy Lewis asserts of his boyhood’s most admired teacher, William Kirkpatrick, ‘the Great Knock’, that ‘the most casual remark was taken as a summons to disputation.’ And from Kirkpatrick he would appear to have received much of the colouring of his mind not only as a tutor, a lecturer and a ...”

“... of the beat women seem to have been their deaths. Dying was something they did rather well. William Burroughs’s wife Joan placed a glass on her head one night and challenged her husband to shoot it off with his pistol. Unfortunately, as Johnson laconically puts it, Burroughs’s ‘aim was off that night’. Then there was Elise Cowen, Johnson’s ...”

“... after the rest of Eastern Europe had rejected Stalinism. Agim explained that he had grown tired of Shakespeare’s comedies. ‘Under Hoxha we had nothing but A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure ... what we need now are the tragedies ... to remind people what it was like.’ I wondered why Enver Hoxha, who broke off relations with ...”

“... Peters, Minister of Religion’ in 1983, getting seven questions right on his chosen subject (William Temple, former archbishop of Canterbury) and nine wrong. He claimed, falsely, to have written a book called Know Yourself. Simon Winchester blurbs Sisman’s book as an ‘utterly mad and wholly delightful story of chicanery and fantasy … which involves ...”

“... Tower Menagerie was not proof against the myths about animals which persisted down the centuries. Shakespeare helped to perpetuate one of these in II Henry VI, where Jack Cade says ‘I’ll make thee eat cast iron like an ostrich and swallow my sword like a great pin, ere thou and I part.’ A French bestiary encouraged the idea that ostriches could digest ...”

“... of a historical artefact as a punchbowl or a gateleg table, and blank verse before Marlowe and Shakespeare was not particularly expressive by our standards. This for instance from Gorboduc: This fire shall waste their love, their lives, their land, And ruthful ruin shall destroy them both, I wish not this (O King) so to befall, But fear the thing, that I ...”

“... was once famous, at that high noon when Robert Louis Stevenson thought Meredith second only to Shakespeare. Roy has become a sort of court jester for a German margravine and – to cut a long story short – has agreed to pose as a newly erected equestrian statue in bronze, so that she can win a bet. The ruse convinces everyone until Harry passes by the ...”

“... to grow in time together. The whole is bound together by the rich Renaissance epigraphs, from Shakespeare, Burton, Spenser, and Dekker, William Turner and Pierre Erondell, Drayton and Sidney, which like the buildings of the university town marshal a reader’s progress and whisper, in their proportions and through their ...”

“... tongues. How great a diversity, Swift can hardly have imagined; it needed the researches of a William Jones or a Wilhelm von Humboldt to begin to persuade literary Europeans that they were not quite the masters of the speaking world. Now we know better – well, perhaps just a little. We know that something like four thousand languages are spoken in the ...”

“... and argument’. At times, the argument bullies the art a bit, as in Donaldson’s discussion of Shakespeare’s ‘Rape of Lucrece’, but this is an absorbing and persuasive study, though it offers simply to tell ‘a story about a story’. The Roman Lucretia was raped by Tarquin, the king’s son, or rather blackmailed into submission by Tarquin’s ...”

“... logically are the abiding features of the English character, traceable in English literature from Shakespeare downwards.’ The profound patriotism of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what ...”

“... Spitting Image to present her forty years later as a gin-swilling commoner. Since then death and William Shawcross have done little to humanise her. His biography was pious to a degree and, like his equally fulsome edition of her letters, much too long.* Despite all of which a personality, powerful and in some ways admirable and unusual, manages to break ...”

“... hell – where the fires would keep burning for as long as there were sinners for incineration. In William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), which unearths utopia in 21st-century Hammersmith, the Houses of Parliament have been repurposed as a store for dung, while in Utopia itself, Thomas More specifies that Utopians use gold, which is abundant, for chamber ...”