“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and the plainer In Search of Lost Time taken on.There is more. In 2013, the first volume of William C. Carter’s ‘revised, annotated’ version of Scott Moncrieff’s work appeared from Yale. Four other volumes of the set are now also available, with one still to come. Carter speaks of Scott Moncrieff’s ‘missteps’, and of his style being ‘at ...”

“... writers whose style she admired. She also championed Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams. She did some work for Italian radio and wrote a few prefaces, mostly for works by religious figures.One such preface, to a 1966 edition of Weil’s Waiting for God, caused an uproar. Although Campo had long been an admirer of Weil, her ...”

“... that way. After all, Larkin the librarian –No, I don’t think one can.Or Eliot the publisher. William Shakespeare engaged very successfully with the workaday world.Of course.As for your ‘Lives of the Poets’, which you’ve just finished, can you tell me which of the poets are in it?Well, they’re pretty much the ones you’d expect. They are all ...”

“... Two days later, Gide wrote once more to his mother: ‘One sees characters like this in a Shakespeare play. And Wilde! Wilde!! What more tragic life is there than his! If only he were more careful – if he were capable of being careful – he would be a genius, a great genius … I am happy to have met him in such a distant place, though even Algiers ...”

“... she was Gustave’s lover; certainly, she gave him English lessons. ‘In six months, I will read Shakespeare like an open book,’ he boasted; and together they translated Byron’s ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ into French. (Back in 1844, Flaubert claimed to his friend Louis de Cormenin that he had translated Candide into English.) In May 1857, Flaubert ...”

“... between Malthus’s invocation of nature to recommend social inaction, in contrast with, say, William Godwin’s active interventionism. In fact, Malthus was a true guru of evolutionary theory. Darwin explains in The Origin that, in part, his theory ‘is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole of animal and vegetable ...”

“... it’s The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my ...”

“... English village. On Thursday 27 December 1756 two of Turner’s neighbours, Thomas Fuller and William Piper, arrived uninvited and stayed smoking and drinking (‘sponging,’ their host records bitterly) until they began to quarrel, because Tho. Fuller told that which in my opinion was really true, viz., Master Piper, being lavish of his professions of ...”

“... an alternative tradition in Henrician historiography, and not only on the Catholic side. Beside Shakespeare’s tribute to Henry stands Sir Walter Ralegh’s protest: ‘if all the pictures and patterns of a merciless prince were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king.’ To the 17th-century republicans ...”

“... a range of theoretical essays, and works of literary theory criticising French drama and promoting Shakespeare as a worthy successor to the ancient Greek tragedians. But he was a dramatist first and last, widely respected for a series of increasingly serious and original plays, beginning in 1755 with Miss Sara Sampson, a tragedy of ordinary life set in an ...”

“... from Hamlet, Phèdre or Faust can be made to yield more, and more decisive information about Shakespeare, Racine or Goethe and their times than would a systematic … treatment of their lives and works. Indeed, the present book may be cited as an illustration. The important words are ‘can be made to yield’, since the doctrine has been much abused ...”

“... been some clever and readable tweaks on the model for earlier writers, by whom I essentially mean Shakespeare (a year in the life of, a day in the life of), but even the most brilliant have served up the same formula: sub-novelistic sentences of high drama follow (unsubstantiated) assertions of scholarly authority, with a dash of murder, intrigue, vivid ...”