“... who played his cards close to his chest. This is one reason there are so many Chaucers. As with Shakespeare, any ‘reading’ of the man is a thinly disguised reading of his work. Turner offers instead a tapestry of interwoven tales. She traces Chaucer’s poetic development by examining his sources – French, Italian and Latin – and discusses the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... drawn to Henry V’s soliloquy before the Battle of Agincourt, yet does not seem to realise that Shakespeare was parading both the vanity and the vainglory of kingship. He seems to think, in his more arrogant moments, that he can walk on water, but he also possesses a remarkable capacity for shooting himself in the foot. And in marrying Lady Diana ...”

“... and Trevor Phillips’s history of postwar black England. Early arrivals who had been weaned on Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Dickens imagined the metropolis as ancient and archival. They had peered at celluloid images of its citadels and monuments on the Movietone newsreels screened before the main features at their local Empire Theatre fleapit. They had ...”

“... moral philosophers based their arguments on self-evident truths. (An unclerical example is Sir William Temple, in his essay on Epicurus.) It was also commonly agreed that few men bowed voluntarily to the constraints of morality; nearly all had to be driven into it by supernatural warnings. Objectors, like Shaftesbury and his followers, were audible but ...”

“... with factual errors, is hopelessly uncritical, and largely derives from the work of writers like William Blisset and Herbert Knust. I would have added John DiGaetani’s Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel, which was published four years earlier, but Martin claims that a book of that title ‘by Bernard di Gaetani’ was ‘under preparation at the ...”

“... a speaker’s intention’ has at best only a trivial relevance to literature. A phone call from Shakespeare might disambiguate a tricky line, but it could not disambiguate Hamlet, which, it might be maintained, is undisambiguable. Juhl, however, wishes to apply his rule to all literary works, including Finnegans Wake. All are speech acts, and to be ...”