“... original sketch of the Greenwich Dome’ are twinned with ‘a sketch design for a dome by Sir Christopher Wren’. The puny scale of St Paul’s Cathedral is set against the enclosed acres of the tent on Bugsby’s Marshes. ‘This awesome structure dwarfs the famous domes of history.’ But, walking around nautical Greenwich, the first thing the visitor ...”

“... these anomalies on his or her own. But what are the strengths of the book? To begin with, Wyatt, Marlowe, Chapman, Golding and Ben Jonson are all lavishly represented, as is proper. Many interesting lesser-knowns from the 17th and 18th centuries sport alongside their mightier contemporaries, and here the editor should be applauded for the thoroughness of his ...”

“... an elderly private eye who may or may not be the original of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and who recounts an ostensibly real-life gangster episode which brought Chandler and the archetypal Marlowe together. Similarly the investigation of the Ellery Queen biographical tangle leads into a little ‘sealed ...”

“... low, cross-court strokes – rather than hitting big winners. In literature, blood clots were Christopher Marlowe, violent, restless, brilliant, while the cancer would be Shakespeare, coming in many guises, dependable, sly, fully memorable. In painting, the blood clots would be Jackson Pollock, the cancer Barnett Newman. In Tory politics, Boris ...”

“... Who better to be our guide to modern Cambridge than the Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History? Christopher Brooke was brought up in Cambridge, the son of the professor of medieval history and himself a post-war Apostle. He begins by whisking us round the colleges telling us what each was like in Victorian times and how the abolition of the religious Tests and the Royal Commission (1872) transformed Cambridge from being a provincial seminary and a federation of colleges into a university of faculties and departments where the dons could marry and no longer had to be clergymen ...”

“... The undercurrent of Faustian defiance in the face of extinction finally colours our view of Marlowe himself, who from time to time, like Ovid, deliberately fosters the irony that, in the depiction of death, the artist can achieve immortality. The rise of general interest in anatomy in the 16th century springs directly from experience of the plague, and ...”

“... also a long-standing American paradigm, from Natty Bumppo to the Ringo Kid, from Captain Ahab to Marlowe; in this sense, Clift’s type was just the latest variant on a character already dear to Hollywood. Indeed, as Lawrence remarks, in the first half of his career Clift’s generational struggle was as much about fitting in as rebelling; he was a defiant ...”

“... the greatest English poet whom it is possible for serious readers to dislike. There are no fans of Marlowe, Jonson or Webster who cannot also find pleasure in Shakespeare; there are no admirers of Piers Plowman or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight who cannot also appreciate The Canterbury Tales. But it is not hard to find enthusiastic readers of Marvell or ...”

“... tutor of King’s known to generations of undergraduates who performed on stage in the ADC, the Marlowe or the Musical Society, and whose interest in politics or indeed in ideas was negligible: clearly his bonhomie disguised an Iago. When that identification proved too absurd, the hunt shifted to economists, to Gramsci’s friend Piero Sraffa or – a ...”

“... work hitherto much less influential than the very early (and prodigious) Seven Types of Ambiguity. Christopher Norris comes right out and calls Complex Words ‘a work of deconstruction’. His collection is meant to demonstrate that Empson can be accommodated in modern theory. It can now be shown that he was in many ways anticipating the interests and ...”

“... forms of criticism. Among the most deep and distinguished of this last kind of interpreter is Christopher Ricks, whose previous books include Milton’s Grand Style, Keats and Embarrassment, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice and Beckett’s Dying Words. Dylan’s Visions of Sin is the culmination of at least three decades’ critical engagement with the songs of ...”

“... for the King’s Men, John Fletcher, the sentimental doyen of romantic tragicomedy. After Marlowe, Middleton had perhaps the most arrestingly individual voice among Shakespeare’s contemporaries; yet whether it is just (or even helpful) to claim for him the title of ‘our other Shakespeare’ is a question this edition repeatedly forces us to ...”

“... he and some of his colleagues have developed on the characteristics of books they haven’t read. Christopher Booker did a rather similar job, informing us that ‘I have never read The Road to Oxiana,’ and then telling us his opinion of it, in a recent review of Paul Fussell’s Abroad.By an amiable irony, the same issue of the Spectator which contains ...”

“... therefore, needs to be a Heinrich Schliemann in the cuttings libraries, as well as a Philip Marlowe of the Army List and old postal directories. Archer’s father presents the first difficulty. Mantle tells us that he died in Weston-super-Mare in 1955, when Archer was 15: but who was he and what did he do? Newspaper interviews with Archer offer a ...”

“... promoted. The writers whom he valued, and who crop up most often in these letters (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Herbert, Donne, Marvell, Fielding, Coleridge, Joyce, Orwell, Dylan Thomas), had in his view found ways to resist religious conformity (religion and politics for Empson are virtually inextricable from each other). They give voice to the personal conflicts ...”