“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the fabled ‘Shadow’ himself. He was an enfant terrible in the theatre, with adaptations of Shakespeare, a negro Macbeth, a famous Mercury Julius Caesar and the banned The cradle will rock by Marc Blitzstein. The notorious radio production of The War of the Worlds and his epic compilation of Shakespeare’s History ...”

“... was ‘as British as the poetic landscapes between its covers’, which included those of Shakespeare, Thomas Gray, Wordsworth and the Border ballads. But it was British in a determinedly monolingual way (Palgrave even worried about including Burns’s Scottish dialect). He included nothing medieval (none of his poets was born before the ...”

“... did. Even the most full-throated monarchical warblers – the purest example in Nairn’s book is William Rees-Mogg – do not wish to argue that the Americans or, say, the Swiss ought to have a king. And many would probably be embarrassed to have the Windsors bracketed with the House of Saud or the Sultan of Brunei – although these are the only two ...”

“... standards of truth created by poetic lying, the strands of ideas lose any validity.’ She targets William Empson’s habit of bluffly summarising a poem’s underlying message without really discussing the form, as well as the contextual critics who write as if poems are ‘engaged in the language-game of giving information’. But Poetic Artifice is also a ...”

“... Sailing back to Washington, the war-weary Lincoln, equally characteristically, seemed immersed in Shakespeare. With some of his staff around him on deck, he read from Macbeth the lines: Duncan is in his grave. After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well. A few days later the implicit prophecy had come true. McPherson presents Lincoln through his actions ...”

“... of her to jib at the word ‘stream’ when May Sinclair, writing of her novels in 1918, used William James’s ‘stream of consciousness’ to describe them. ‘Pool’, she thought, would have done better. She began writing Pilgrimage in 1913, the year when The White Peacock and Du Côté de Chez Swann were published and a year before. Dubliners came ...”

“... stigmatised ‘as a perversion of “good” womanhood’. Thus Margaret of Anjou was vilified by Shakespeare as the ‘she-wolf of France’. The qualities these women needed to succeed were the very qualities that could destroy them. Having captured her cousin King Stephen and adopted the title Lady of England as a presage to her own coronation, Matilda ...”

“... which runs to leaving out the definite article where idiom would put it in, and vice versa. Of William Morris he tells us that his ‘interest in religion only began to detoxify itself into an interest in the churches’ qualities as architecture,’ although there are no antecedent churches in his text: yet he says that Morris’s techniques ‘made many ...”

“... age. He has long been known as Darwin’s bulldog – a venerable English kind of hound, known to Shakespeare. Calling him Darwin’s Rottweiler (a breed which did not exist in the 19th century and which in England did not become notorious for its savagery until the 1980s) is wilfully disconcerting – and tasteless. It seems true (on the testimony of ...”

“... on his own work or even to lead his readers through a particular poem. Valéry, Allen Tate, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Lowell were instructive in that way. But it is rare for a poet to lead readers through a poem, draft by draft, or explain how he settled for one word rather than another. Yeats did not offer to ...”

“... as the founder of modern drama. Today, he is the most performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. It was an unlikely success story. Born in 1828 in an isolated town in Norway, when the country was still dependent on its long-time coloniser Denmark, Ibsen grew up speaking a language known by few and lacking any great dramatic tradition. In order ...”