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“... designer’, Paul Johnson announces. Huffington insists that his appeal was ephemeral. ‘Unlike Shakespeare and Mozart ... Picasso was not a timeless genius.’ Picasso painted the brothel, the studio, the bull-ring, the circus – not the home, interestingly, and not the garden, but the view from a studio window and plants in the studio ...”

“... life whatsoever he touches, the last reincarnation of Dionysus – Rabelais then, or perhaps Shakespeare, in some divine moment between creating Titania and Falstaff – had either of them been a painter, might well have painted the original of this portrait. The repetition of ‘Rabelais’, and the distinctive placing of ‘then’, the ...”

“... book which perhaps presents a more historical Rembrandt, a Rembrandt located in the period between Shakespeare and the Impressionists. ‘Retirement to rule, and the delight mixed with horror in the discovery that the self alone is what one rules, is a familiar scenario from Prospero on his island to Monet in his garden. To these examples I would add Rembrandt ...”

“... the English countryside, the English sense of humour, the English love of fair play.’ William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and Edward Elgar were brought forth to prove that the roots of British character lay deep in the countryside, and were still healthy despite the enervating effects of urban life. Yet to anyone who took the trouble to look dispassionately ...”

“... restore Hardy to his rightful place as the greatest and most versatile English author after Shakespeare’. In this crusade to return Hardy to his throne, Seymour-Smith does not grapple, as we might have expected, with the literary competition – with Dickens, Eliot or Lawrence – but rather with the alleged critical assassins: Carl Weber (‘a ...”

“... broods on a mountain above the city with her feet among unemployed tools of trade and science. Shakespeare described a meaningless universe long before Thomson did, and in more memorable words, but his usual mouthpieces are half-crazed kings – important folk. Even Parolles – the exposed cheat and coward who says ‘Simply the things I am shall make me ...”

“... in Group Sex Romp!’ – but one fact which makes the case worth pursuing is the involvement of Shakespeare’s former landlord Christopher Mountjoy. There is an obvious link: like the three goldworkers, Mountjoy was French. Also like them, he lived in the Cripplegate area (though his house was within the London city walls, on respectable Silver ...”

“... completely. But actor-playwrights go back from Marber, Pinter, Osborne and Coward to Jonson and Shakespeare. And if you leave out the Irish (by birth or upbringing), you lose Congreve, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Wilde and Shaw. The source that gave London The Importance of Being Earnest and Arms and the Man a hundred years ago shows no signs of drying up: Irish ...”

“... Compared to boring old Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, we think, had a short life and a gay one. When not writing his sonorous verse, he was spying, preaching atheism, fighting and getting murdered. Park Honan has done one of the two already, and now has done the other. Coming shortly after David Riggs’s solid, even too-solid The World of Christopher Marlowe, his Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy feels a little lightweight ...”

“... by reading, along with the major poets (Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson), dramatists (none matched Shakespeare and Shaw in popularity), discursive prose writers (Carlyle and Ruskin are the constant companions of the earnest seeker after light), and the great unclassifiable, John Bunyan. The composition of this canon changed somewhat as new names established ...”

“... reform-minded Saif found himself in after his father’s people had revolted as ‘the stuff of Shakespeare’, but that surely is letting everyone concerned off far too lightly. He may just be a smooth-talking thug, and many online observers have noted that he seems to model himself on the smooth-talking thug and would-be businessman Stringer Bell from The ...”

“... is uttered: there is only the finality of openness. The theory of openness came to Pushkin from Shakespeare. In his admirable study – his ‘other Pushkin’ is the storyteller and novelist, not the poet – Paul Debreczeny quotes Pushkin’s comments on Shakespeare’s characterisation. They go hand in hand with ...”

“... captures the word’s range from ‘courteous’ through to ‘clever’ and ‘dextrous’) Nicholas in the Miller’s Tale, swears ‘by Goddes corpus’ (he is a learned fellow, so can swear in Langlish) when he is bursting with laughter because the foppish Absolon has been made to kiss Alison’s arse. When ...”

“... the measure’, to borrow a phrase from Antony and Cleopatra, veering, rather like Shakespeare’s Antony, between the sublime and the bathetic, the uncannily sure-footed and the hysterically overblown. Is early, nature-fixated Hughes best, red in tooth and claw, or the minatory spinner of parables in Crow of 1970, or should the palm go to the ...”

“... then, on its success in positioning – or repositioning – him in relation to the Holocaust. Nicholas Wright Gillham’s new Life isn’t quite satisfying in this regard. It does an excellent job of laying out Galton’s many mini-careers, and closes with a brief overview of the events that led to Nazi eugenics. Galton, we learn, ‘would have been ...”