“... Culture’s got to go’ (the course, they meant – but it sounded more ominous than that). William Bennett, Secretary for Education, also came to visit the campus. He is the author of To reclaim a heritage: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education (1984). Bennett thought that Western Culture had to stay and said so, face to face with Stanford’s ...”

“... in King Lear that he could never bear to reread the play’s last scenes until forced to as a Shakespeare editor. In ‘Poetical Justice’ Enright’s speaker presents himself as similarly disturbed by tragedy’s unfairness: It will be many years before I read again Of the death of Cordelia, Or indeed (though he deserves cuffing) Of the Macduff boy’s ...”

“... name of a property which all true statements share. It is what is common to ‘Bacon did not write Shakespeare,’ ‘it rained yesterday,’ ‘E equals mc2’ ‘Love is better than hate,’ ‘The Allegory of Painting was Vermeer’s best work,’ ‘2 plus 2 is 4’ and ‘there are non-denumerable infinities.’ Pragmatists doubt that there is much to be ...”

“... he is quick to catch what he calls its ‘ache, or regret, or conjecture’. He greatly admires William Morris. He is snappish when young (Dickens ‘has added nothing to our understanding of human character’), stealthy when old (‘What Mr Conrad’s left hand gives back ... is simply Mr Conrad himself’), but he is always severe, and demanding. He is ...”

“... Stevenson) or exercised significant influence in Australian cultural history (e.g. Dickens, Shakespeare); and on other topics. By historical and other cultural contexts is meant those aspects of Australian life and history about which readers unfamiliar with Australia might need basic information (e.g. the Australian States or the Heidelberg School of ...”

“... later version ‘richer, more complex’, like Jack Stillinger and Zachary Leader; or decide, with William Empson, that it has been mangled ‘for reasons of conscience’? It is not easy to make out what Coleridge thought about the unity of the self, but surely having a sense of it is consistent with occasional changes of mind. His practice suggests that he ...”

“... digs its own grave, defaces whatever it embraces. The book skilfully traces these motifs through Shakespeare, Montaigne, Raleigh, Donne and an array of Early Modern others, before turning to consider the denial of death implicit in Enlightenment thought. As Jean Baudrillard remarks, there is a sense that for modernity ‘it is not normal to be ...”

“... who seems to have detested him from the outset. She soon struck up a sexual liaison with one William Alder, who was discovered by a servant in bed with Lady Portsmouth while Portsmouth himself lay by the couple’s side, apparently asleep. It was troilism with a new twist. This, too, would serve later as evidence of his lunacy. It was proper for Alder to ...”

“... known as King Philip’s War, Reverend Hope Atherton was the chaplain accompanying Captain William Turner’s militia on their march to an Algonquian encampment near Deerfield, Massachusetts in the Connecticut River Valley. There they ambushed the sleeping tribe, slaughtered some of them and drove others into the river, which swept them over the ...”

“... Wotton’s first reception by the doge and Senate in the autumn of 1604. Rutter, an expert in Shakespeare performance studies, reminds us that ‘by a marvellous coincidence’ the audience was held on the same day as the first court performance in London of The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. As Wotton is ‘walking the pavements of Venice, King ...”

“... of these dusty masterpieces. Petrarch is ‘numbingly tedious and repetitive’, and if you find Shakespeare’s Sonnets a bit of a drag the former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford agrees that ‘though they are world famous, they may disappoint modern readers. Some of them consist largely of complicated wordplay, and scarcely engage our ...”

“... or twice as well. He went to burlesque houses and developed a taste for theatre, especially for Shakespeare. ‘My, but that man did have ideas!’ he said later. ‘He would have been an inventor, a wonderful inventor, if he had turned his mind to it. He seemed to see the inside of everything.’ He also studied electrical science. He was 17 when he made ...”

“... Robert Harding’s ‘Aristocrats and Lawyers in French Provincial Government, 1559-1648’. William J. Bouwsma writes on ‘Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture’. His most interesting point is that the words ‘anxiety’ and ‘anxious’ entered the English language in the 16th and 17th centuries. Professor Bouwsma attributes anxiety to ...”

“... dead people I got to show this book to: one was Richard Hamilton who died this week; the other was William Burroughs was died earlier on. William Burroughs was very generous in a terrifying kind of way. He said it’s okay, and why wasn’t it science fiction? I had a very tough day with him. Very ...”

“... up to then that there were short poems in the 16th century. I knew there were sonnets and plays by Shakespeare and The Faerie Queen, but even saying the phrase now – ‘short poem in the 16th century’ – makes me wish I were writing about the work of Fulke Greville or Sir Walter Ralegh or Sir Thomas Wyatt. I studied English and History. In English we were ...”