“... Westmorland hills; Hardy too, haunting his Wessex ways, A pastoral order dying in his gaze, and William Yeats – a ‘stubborn and age-angry man’ – who laughed ‘with rod and can’. Hall attributes vain powers by falsely calling these poets ‘lords/ Of a landscape’; this sort of tribute does neither living nor dead any ...”

“... Yale and Harvard, ‘more decadently turns sport into ballet’, though why myth, religion or Shakespeare are not also made ‘decadent’ by the same transformation goes unexplained, unless for Conrad ballet itself is ‘decadent’. At first, Kipling and Stevenson were happy that America was an alternative to the Victorian novel, since they were looking ...”

“... we may consider the following passage dating from 1895 on a painting then in the collection of Sir William Farrer but today in the Ashmolean Museum: perhaps the freshest and most charming, as well as the earliest of all Montagna’s existing works ... the child is thin-haired, large-headed, and chubby-limbed. His ear has the nick in the cheek so rarely absent ...”

“... heretical books. Chief among the writers of these and among More’s English antagonists was William Tyndale, Luther’s chief English disciple – if it is fair to call anyone so combative and individual the disciple of anyone. In the preface to his translation of the Pentateuch, made in 1530, Tyndale tells us how he had determined to translate the New ...”

“... would remodel itself perpetually, like a transformer or a superchangeling: an unrealisable ideal William Burroughs brought down to the affordability of ordinary people in his proposal for the cut-up book, which you could simply rearrange at home according to your fancy. But The Invisible in Architecture is closer to these ideal images than the literary works ...”

“... stuff and nonsense indeed.) Malcolm traces the comic uses of Marlowe’s style by writers from Shakespeare to Thomas Nashe, whose insanely eloquent, near-Joycean tribute to the Yarmouth herring-smoking industry, Lenten Stuff, only just escapes being classified as nonsense, but the crucial mediating figure between Marlowe and the sheer nonsense of the ...”

“... fears for his family and disillusionment with the practical realities of becoming a Muslim William Wallace in somebody else’s war stifled his yearning to be a righteous soldier. During the Bosnian conflict he visited the barracks of the Kateebah mujahedin, the Bosnian foreign legion, but stayed only three weeks and did not fight, although he ...”

“... a range of theoretical essays, and works of literary theory criticising French drama and promoting Shakespeare as a worthy successor to the ancient Greek tragedians. But he was a dramatist first and last, widely respected for a series of increasingly serious and original plays, beginning in 1755 with Miss Sara Sampson, a tragedy of ordinary life set in an ...”

“... from Hamlet, Phèdre or Faust can be made to yield more, and more decisive information about Shakespeare, Racine or Goethe and their times than would a systematic … treatment of their lives and works. Indeed, the present book may be cited as an illustration. The important words are ‘can be made to yield’, since the doctrine has been much abused ...”

“... been some clever and readable tweaks on the model for earlier writers, by whom I essentially mean Shakespeare (a year in the life of, a day in the life of), but even the most brilliant have served up the same formula: sub-novelistic sentences of high drama follow (unsubstantiated) assertions of scholarly authority, with a dash of murder, intrigue, vivid ...”

“... alone has seen the publication of An Absence of Cousins, a new title for the Pulitzer-nominated Shakespeare’s Kitchen (2007); Tell Me a Mitzi (1970), one of her best-loved children’s books; and several more ‘flash fictions’ in the sequence that formed the backbone of the 2023 collection Ladies’ Lunch. Last year, Segal was inducted into the ...”

“... trouble seemed to begin with my parents, their pasts and names. My father Wadie was later called William (an early discrepancy that I assumed for a long time was only an Anglicisation of his Arabic name, but soon it appeared to me suspiciously like a case of assumed identity, with the name ‘Wadie’ cast aside except by his wife and sister for not very ...”

“... 17th centuries, alongside which later Viennese classicism appeared a bland retreat. When you hear William Byrd and Thomas Tallis for the first time, you don’t know where things are going; there are weird harmonies and tonal shifts, curious crooked cadences that loom suddenly from unlit verges. And such dissonances! In the cathedral, we loved to squeeze out ...”

“... apart the urban and rural radical traditions – an attempt which contrived, for instance, to make William Morris look bosky. Indeed, in ‘The Road’, a crucial 86-line poem which is not in Kavanagh, he celebrates their essential congruity – and a politics we do not meet again until the recollected ‘war’ poems of the asylum years: Anyhow folk live ...”

“... often enough he finished his projects. Yet the things he wished he could do – ‘a dozen Chekhov-Shakespeare novels’, as one of his editors, Robert Phelps, summarised a characteristic resolution; a life of Jesus; a novel about the atom bomb – were to become an almost public constituent of his writing life. His criticism is marked by the same mixture of ...”