“... in 1980 and included in the present volume. This essay was at least nominally a review of one of Frances Yates’s studies of the occult, but it served as the occasion for Empson to air a scholarly interest, one might even say obsession, that continued to occupy him until his death in 1984. Empson argued that there was in the 16th century a belief, far more ...”

“... references – and others would have gone up in the fires that commonly broke out in the crowded wood-built cities. The losses are heaviest among the first wave of playmakers working in London in the late 1580s and early 1590s, the so-called ‘pre-Shakespearean’ period. Not a single play by the sonneteer Thomas Watson remains, though he was described in ...”

“... shaving soap in a wooden bowl, the City office with highly polished desk and leather blotters and wood panelling and the secretary in an anteroom who patched us through on the telephone, the beautifully trimmed Rover Coupé with crackled leather seats, the subscription to the Spectator, the pot of Gentleman’s Relish in the fridge.What you think you ...”

“... of C.S. Lewis’s distasteful Narnia series, in which a wardrobe gives onto an extraterrestrial wood. The central characters in Lewis’s religious fantasies are a lot of dead children – a motif we might have expected to find discarded by the 1950s. Kingsley, writing in 1862, had used it to better effect. Macdonald himself, in Lilith, invented a country ...”

“... from the grave. In some respects the most original and important contribution to Forward! is Frances Wood’s on 1964-79. The author has been a fully engaged Labour activist and conveys some of the pain and confusion which the movement suffered over devolution in the Seventies. Labour’s sketchy ‘National Plan’ had been scuppered by 1966, and ...”

“... America, from New York to Tucson, Arizona, with a spell over Christmas at the Church of St Jane Frances de Chantal in North Hollywood. The Christie’s sale of Marilyn’s relics raised $13,405,785. The Ferragamo ruby shoes were bought for $48,300 by the son of the man who made them, while Lots 51 and 40, the Santa Monica cardigan and the dress from Let’s ...”

“... closest in aesthetic to the Burkean sublime), once being informed that her Altham Stood in the Wood Alone, and Saw a Ghost (1783), from Ossian, contained an ‘uninteresting’ main character and a ‘Marble Ghost’. In Maria Costive (1786), an unpleasant contemporary caricature, she figures as a vacuous, snub-nosed lunatic in a Bedlam cell, hair untidy ...”

“... he fits the rivalries between France and the Holy Roman Empire into the tiny world of castle, wood and ford which could be seen from the windows of his childhood home at La Devinière. (It still can.) His wars are like children’s games: he delighted in games, while seeing most of them as ways of wasting time when extended beyond infancy. Great ...”

“... honeysuckle along the back wall or hanging tasteful Indian friezes in a four-storeyed St John’s Wood mansion are the pursuits of reactionaries and manipulative control freaks. The cosmetic is opposed to the ethical. In Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, the only way for Rosie to convey her hatred for her ‘crude, vicious, racist and ignorant’ father – a former ...”

“... Cleopatra at Stratford the curtain rose with Antony on his knees pleasuring the Egyptian queen of Frances de la Tour. Even the jaded eyebrows of Stratford went up a bit at this and just before it transferred to the Barbican Alan rang and began without preamble: ‘I’m sure you will be relieved to learn that for our London debut the director has elbowed the ...”