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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 beside the nude ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Joseph Addison, who airbrushed out Milton’s regicidal politics, or David Garrick, who turned Shakespeare from upstart crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry anthologies cashed in on the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of higher education is a curious one. I would recommend Pope-Hennessy to consider the plays of Shakespeare or the paintings of Titian. This passage on Bandinelli arises out of a discussion of Cellini’s marble Ganymede. Pope-Hennessy reviews other 16th-century representations of the myth, including the famous finished drawing given by Michelangelo to ...”

“... an invitation to partake in the bourgeois bonanza by passing a publicly subsidised evening at a Shakespeare play or a Bartok opera would elicit bafflement, fear or derision. To be fair, the carapace of middle-class philistinism has softened a bit over the past twenty years, from hostility to the arts to indifference. Some of the improvement must, I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the iconoclasm in Ely Cathedral. ‘If we wish to understand how British culture could produce a Shakespeare, but not a Rembrandt, this is as close as we are likely to get.’ This suggests the disadvantages of a narrowly British education, for there was extensive iconoclasm in the Low Countries. Far more serious than this is his treatment of the avant-garde ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”