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“... 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 ...”

“... mouse-wouse!’ The Shine screenplay makes the connection for us. Gay piano teacher Ben Rosen (Nicholas Bell), in a scene cut from the film, describes David’s father, Peter (Armin Mueller-Stahl), as a ‘poor man’s Leopold Mozart’. Pianospeak, we’re to believe, indicates mental illness. Mozart was insane, according to a playwright too invested in ...”

“... the measure’, to borrow a phrase from Antony and Cleopatra, veering, rather like Shakespeare’s Antony, between the sublime and the bathetic, the uncannily sure-footed and the hysterically overblown. Is early, nature-fixated Hughes best, red in tooth and claw, or the minatory spinner of parables in Crow of 1970, or should the palm go to the ...”

“... into the mainstream of European thought: the presence of his Adagia throughout the works of Shakespeare is an example. Nevertheless, the symbolic importance of the Novum lnstrumentum in defining the impact of Christian humanism on the intellectual culture of the day is matched by that of no other single work, including his own Praise of Folly. The fact ...”

“... in the Old Kent Road’ during distinguished soirées. For the NCPE Festival, texts of Shakespeare have been unearthed, and puzzled native audiences are herded into a restored theatre to hear a Russian-produced drama called Romeo and Juliet. But at a clandestine level, a group of officers and civil servants are plotting a coup against the ...”

“... how the world would look from an alien perspective was something Weelkes had in common with Shakespeare. Earth’s volcanos ‘thaw’ the sky, a merchant ‘reports’ on Fogo when he returns to Spain; but the couplet repeated at the end of each stanza locates the ultimate strangeness in the self. Each time they sing the couplet, the voices stop after ...”

“... Compared to boring old Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, we think, had a short life and a gay one. When not writing his sonorous verse, he was spying, preaching atheism, fighting and getting murdered. Park Honan has done one of the two already, and now has done the other. Coming shortly after David Riggs’s solid, even too-solid The World of Christopher Marlowe, his Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy feels a little lightweight ...”

“... also be able to move freely in the world. Addressing the question of why there has been no female Shakespeare, Woolf traces the likely career of his imaginary and equally talented sister Judith, following her from patchy education to rebellion and flight to London, where every door including the stage door is closed to her and the streets are dangerous. There ...”

“... I probably wouldn’t have chosen a work of criticism rather than Proust if the Bible and Shakespeare weren’t already there, but for some years now I have taken the view that my ‘Desert Island’ book, if I were asked, would have to be David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. First published in 1970, it has just re-appeared as A Biographical Dictionary of Film in a third edition that is revised and considerably enlarged ...”

“... and Olson Life Records, a body of paper which makes Chaucer far better evidenced as a person than Shakespeare two centuries later; on the other, there is the persistent refusal of these documents to see him as what we think we know he was (the major poet of his age), presenting him instead as a quite important civil servant with good connections to power, and ...”

“... trusteeship of the National Gallery. He was equally passionate about literature, and could quote Shakespeare at enormous length. He was an enlightened president and governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre over many years and supported both Peter Hall and Peter Brook at a time when their avant-garde work frequently ...”

“... story. A fuller account would begin with the neoclassicism of Charlotte Lennox, the novelist and Shakespeare critic who in 1759 translated Pierre Brumoy’s book of versions and commentaries, The Greek Theatre. Or even with Nicholas Udall, who wrote in 1548 of ‘young virgins so nouzled and trained in the studie of ...”

“... then, on its success in positioning – or repositioning – him in relation to the Holocaust. Nicholas Wright Gillham’s new Life isn’t quite satisfying in this regard. It does an excellent job of laying out Galton’s many mini-careers, and closes with a brief overview of the events that led to Nazi eugenics. Galton, we learn, ‘would have been ...”

“... time, of any time’. Eliot’s essay marked the tercentenary of the death of a contemporary of Shakespeare, who between 1588 and his death had been successively or simultaneously vicar of St Giles Cripplegate; master of Pembroke College, Cambridge; prebendary of St Paul’s; dean of Westminster; and bishop of Chichester, Ely and, finally, Winchester. What ...”

“... the New Puritans, but it is the story really of his own appetite that concerns him. His review of Nicholas Nickleby undoubtedly helped that show to its later success, but Mr Levin claims that he himself ‘legitimised enthusiasm’ (his emphasis). I am drawn to his hope of glimpsing into transcendental things, but most of this offensive book is accusatory: if ...”