“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”