“... locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever needed an eye surgeon (which she did not), and his mad wife, Speranza, had lived, where they had raised their son Oscar, who was four years dead by this time. There’s now a funny ...”

“... idea of literature, and a peculiar division of labour between writer and reader. Their author, William Gaddis, who won the National Book Award with JR, might actually have felt short-changed by the accolade of the imprint, to judge by a riff in JR deploring the way ‘longer works of fiction [are] now dismissed as classics and … largely unread due to the ...”

“... Finest Man.’ But after that the story dies away in minor ditties by Sagittarius, Noel Coward and William Scammell. Regretting the ‘remarkable shortage’ of ‘good, straight’ verse written about ‘public events in England over the past thirty years’, our anthologist adopts a policy of charitable evacuation. His collection seems to suggest that if the ...”

“... has an unfailingly good eye for anecdote and a line in sarky parenthesis – on such things as William Davenant’s pox-rotted nose – worthy of a stand-up comedian. Although it will find a home in that dreariest of Dewey Decimal deserts – the public reference section – this book is fun. But it will not help the ambitious undergraduate pass his/her ...”

“... and Skeres and Poley, much further back than the ‘feast’ at Mrs Bull’s. In As you like it Shakespeare made a reference to Marlowe’s death, cryptic but pointed: he called it ‘a great reckoning in a little room’. What sort of man was Marlowe? Nicholl is not primarily writing a work of literary criticism, but he presents us with a picture of an ...”

“... colour that may stem from their instrumental origins. ‘Orpheus with His Lute’, with words from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, opens the cycle with rising E major semi-quavers, and moments of harmonic shock, with voice and piano sometimes just a tone apart. ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ introduces a hey-nonny perkiness, mirrored by the fifth ...”

“... on the poet’s sore spots. After the humiliation of exile from court, Graves argued confidently, Shakespeare worked through his discontent in the writing of Hamlet. ‘As each scene developed he must have become aware of the political allusions occurring in it, but I cannot believe that he realised what now seems obvious enough: that Hamlet was a political ...”

“... an earthly historicity into his heaven and hell, in an idiom which is both sublime and sublunary. Shakespeare interweaves high and low with equal adroitness, though marks are deducted from his work for failing to take the common people seriously enough. (English literature in general takes a back seat in Auerbach’s work – strangely, given the demotic ...”

“... in the OED, and so offers the hope that I might have made it up – though, alas, I discover that William Gibson, father of cyberpunk, used it to describe an addiction to technology. Ah well, my usage is etymologically purer because it preserves the sense of the Greek root -laliá, meaning ‘chatter’. Shakespeare was a ...”

“... by Gilbert Adair as A Void) or telling Ophelia’s side of the story using only the words Shakespeare allots her (Paul Griffiths’s Let Me Tell You). McBride compensates by scattering full stops with a liberal, raisin-loaf-making hand, but her avoidance of commas is enough to shake up other conventions. Commas bred freely in the favourable conditions ...”

“... view of such occasions. Michael Slater notes his ‘embarrassment’ and ‘irritation’ at the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations of 1864: always for Dickens the best way for a writer or any other artist to be remembered was not through biographies, unless they redounded as much to the honour of the art concerned as did Forster’s Goldsmith, nor ...”

“... being turned into Latin verse. Geoffrey’s story worked through to Holinshed and on to Spenser, Shakespeare and Dryden. It gave us Cymbeline, Lear and Old King Cole, as well as Merlin. But has there ever been a definitive text? It survives with four different dedications, to three different people, singly or paired, and sorting that out is only the start of ...”

“... very good reason, Wittgenstein, Auster, Nabokov, Barnes, McEwan, Spinoza, Amis, Aristotle, Zeno, Shakespeare, Pasternak, Banville, Dostoevsky, Frost, Cervantes, Updike, Beckett, Chekhov (and others) make guest appearances with paraphrased words of wisdom, or just words. Erdal does not wear her reading lightly. She has a penchant for the altered cliché ...”

“... in terms of life-likeness, on what Titian achieved in the first decades of the 16th century. William Rossetti compared Titian to Shakespeare – both were universal geniuses, both loyal to their home towns. A deeper resemblance is the impossibility in either case of identifying a coherent character, a voice in the ...”

“... or the Maison Dieu, an extraordinary medieval hospice, restored by the great Victorian architect William Burges, which turns out to be open only on Wednesdays. To take in the impressive view from the Western Heights, visitors must first locate a narrow path leading from a nondescript car park to a disused gun platform; they don’t do so in droves. There are ...”