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“... 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 ...”

“... them, thus proving himself a cunning ‘politician’ in the precise pejorative sense used by Shakespeare in King Lear: ‘Get thee glass eyes,/And, like a scurvy politician, seem/To see the things thou dost not.’ So while the message of these texts is clear enough, their provenance makes them hard to interpret. The proportion of truth and invention in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cataract and glade, for long drifting walks through the night, as when Dorothy Wordsworth and William and Coleridge set out to watch the moon rise over the Severn. The association with the country as an authentic native place, defined by appealing local idiosyncrasies, becomes key to the word’s peregrinations. The literary scholar Kathryn Sutherland ...”

“... Laforgue, so the dramatic poets were Marlowe and Webster and Tourneur and Middleton and Ford, not Shakespeare. A poet of the supreme greatness of Shakespeare can hardly influence, he can only be imitated: and the difference between influence and imitation is that influence can fecundate, whereas imitation – especially ...”

“... advertise and illuminate other writers and artists. Peter Marshall does so in his new biography, William Godwin. Hazlitt’s vivid account of Godwin’s political importance appears on the first page of Marshall’s introduction, and his worthy book is studded with variations on ‘as Hazlitt rightly observed’. He accepts Hazlitt’s judgments as ...”

“... successes in these struggles but saw they could not be other than limited. Empson himself told Sir William Haley: ‘I think it really was rather exhilarating for us to feel that we were fighting alone against the forces of evil.’ And for the rest of his life he would arm himself against various opponents who, merely by disagreeing with him, betrayed their ...”