“... It is true, as a relatively brief period of teaching shows, that every time you read a Shakespeare play it looks rather different – while also looking much the same; you never step twice into exactly the same text. But there is still something to be said for the assumptions behind Yeats’s phrase, ‘monuments of unageing intellect’. We ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... towns, shops, sports, epochs, writers, eatables. Public Schools come next to Pubs, and Sex next to Shakespeare, both of which are appropriate neighbours. P.G. Wodehouse comes in often, which is also appropriate. This book gave me great entertainment as I worked steadily through it. I got a surprise when I reached T. There was my own name. Examining more ...”

“... and great achievement was to have re-established creative connections with at least one aspect of Shakespeare, and with some of Shakespeare’s great contemporaries, notably Marlowe and Donne. Gunn, I believe, liked this notion, and Clive Wilmer endorses it in his excellent and too brief Introduction to The Occasions of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... restorer of Scottish history’. Does it matter that the notorious cry of ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ greeted Home’s tragedy in London, not Edinburgh? It does. A book worked up out of anecdotage and cursory research ought to get its stories right. Worse than slip-ups of fact, however, are mistaken or misleading effects. Kames and other ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”