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“... 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 ...”

“... Yet he was also the natural outsider in a scene that as well as Britten (born 1913), included William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring presence of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872) hovering over them all. Whether Tippett ever entered the pantheon, or even deserves to, remains an open question for some. His Concerto for Double ...”

“... the kingdom of England itself, but a large proportion testified to pious Anglo-Norman energy after William I’s conquest of England in 1066, resulting in the formation of a diverse range of communities whose distinctive ‘rules’ for communal life were an implied criticism of the monasteries that had gone before. Well-functioning monasteries constantly do ...”

“... when our system of tacit expectations is broken in upon by something radically unfamiliar. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which has nothing to do with Greenblatt’s book, we know what Puck is – a wood-goblin. In The Tempest, which has everything to do with Greenblatt’s book, we just do not know what Ariel is. Why did ...”

“... on comparable occasions. Writing home from the University of Manitoba, he professes admiration for Shakespeare and declares Goethe to be a barbarian. More important to him than either of them was Chesterton, to whom he adhered faithfully, with demonstrable consequences, throughout his life. When he was 23, he went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge to take another ...”

“... midden of man’s ashes.’ In the National Library, 196/195, Stephen has been high-talking about Shakespeare and Pericles, fathers and mothers and daughters: ‘Will any man love the daughter if he has not loved the mother?’ Two lines later, after an interrupted interruption by Mr Best, Gabler inserts the following: Will he not see reborn in her, with the ...”

“... Borrow sleep with Mary? The answer must be a confident No.’ Williams guesses that Borrow met William Beckford – and within a few pages he is treating this conjecture as a known fact. Williams has a theory that Borrow saw himself as a 19th-century St Paul: he supports this with a passage from The Bible in Spain, where Borrow is patronisingly protecting ...”

“... balancing perspective, we should try seeing the comedies, rather than the tragedies, as central to Shakespeare’s development. It is a viewpoint which provides Josipovici with numerous suggestive examples and connections, from Shakespeare and Sterne to Kafka, Borges and Muriel Spark. The powers of artifice, of code and ...”