“... 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 ...”

“... overrated, and neither has much enthusiasm for Connolly. Lyttelton is unexpectedly lukewarm about Shakespeare, except the poetry, though, to be fair, he had to mark GEC papers on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice, in the second of which Hart-Davis had once carried a halberd and therefore had to agree with some of Lyttelton’s ...”

“... Salterns, the family house in Dorset. Her great-grandfather, Isaac Butts, had been the patron of William Blake, and her father gave her daily lessons in observation in the Blake Room, which housed 34 of his water-colours, engravings, portraits and sketches. In 1905, however, her father died and nine months later the contents of the Blake Room were sold to a ...”

“... in certain environments, at certain times, and had certain symptomatic patterns and outcomes. Shakespeare and his audiences were familiar with agues. Julius Caesar greets one of the plotters with the assurance that he was ‘ne’re so much your enemy/As that ague which hath made you lean’, and Caliban, shaking and shivering, is thought to be ‘some ...”

“... be offered a choice of book and luxury to take to their desert island along with the records, plus Shakespeare and the Bible; the first luxury, chosen by the actress Sally Ann Howes, was garlic, distressingly rare in postwar Britain.Plomley continued to script the show for live broadcast until the mid-1950s, proud of his ability – after taking them for lunch ...”

“... a few inches of warm water). And of course there were books. Kezia instructed her in Darwin and Shakespeare, and she read Don Juan in secret under the bedcovers. The nearby Mechanics’ Institute library provided Dickens, Trollope and Austen, and when she took on the local post round Thompson realised that her love of solitary exploration was not only to be ...”

“... has gained recent ground. The ‘literature’ of the English Renaissance has normally meant Shakespeare and his fellow poets and playwrights, not the Book of Common Prayer or – in spite of the status that the period accorded to literary translation – the King James Bible. Donne and George Herbert were only the most conspicuous clergy-poets of their ...”

“... that he related them afterwards as if he had seen or taken part in them.’ He had been Byron and Shakespeare, the prize-fighter Jack Randall (who kept a pub in Chancery Lane). Now, letter by letter, language was torn from him. He described his condition to the documentary historian Agnes Strickland: ‘They have cut off my head and picked out all the letters ...”

“... despite the fact that he admired Ulysses, went regularly to Stravinsky’s ballets and quoted Shakespeare and Keats. He was also a talented linguist. There was more than a trace of class snobbery in Bloomsbury’s view of Coward and, as social nuance was one of his principal themes, he must have been well aware of it. Even while she was a little ‘in ...”

“... in fear of being forcibly circumcised. In pride of place is the portrait of Coryate engraved by William Hole; around its cartouche lounge a trio of bosomy courtesans, one of whom is shown vomiting over his head. Another illustration by Hole, inserted in the text, shows Coryate bowing in greeting to a famous Venetian courtesan, Margarita Emiliana. The ...”

“... and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and ...”

“... blood clots were Christopher Marlowe, violent, restless, brilliant, while the cancer would be Shakespeare, coming in many guises, dependable, sly, fully memorable. In painting, the blood clots would be Jackson Pollock, the cancer Barnett Newman. In Tory politics, Boris Johnson would be a blood clot; William Whitelaw, if ...”

“... and visual concretion but an almost abstract delight in language. This last combination is rare: Shakespeare and Keats have it. Take, for example, a phrase from his celebrated story, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ (1911): a miner lies dead in a living-room, stretched out in ‘the naive dignity of death’. Or a moment in Lawrence’s travel book about ...”