“... remedy for numerous afflictions. The drug was sometimes associated with the dark arts, as it is in Macbeth, where ‘Witch’s mummy’ is among the ingredients of a concoction so powerful that it can raise Banquo from his grave; but its advocates included some of the most distinguished physicians and scientists of the 16th and 17th centuries – prominent ...”

“... all accounts, Rose was difficult to live with (Schwartz’s childhood friends called her Lady Macbeth). Harry often abandoned the family home for periods and in 1923 packed up for good, moving to Chicago. Afterwards, worried that Delmore was becoming a ‘violin’ of his mother’s ‘sick emotions’, he offered to buy his son from Rose for ...”

“... of collectivisation was deemed unsatisfactory and the film burned. Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was violently denounced, and when Meyerhold spoke out in its defence he lost his theatre. Three years later he was arrested, tortured to obtain a ‘confession’, and shot. Mandelstam, a close friend of Akhmatova, was ...”

“... along with the use of minor characters for commentary in the manner of the porter’s scene in Macbeth. Some of this is quite clumsily managed, and the echoings in the speeches of Ahab and Pierre of Lear and Hamlet can be taken as heroic questings of mind or mere folly. There’s often no way of knowing how to take them. Uncertainties and puzzles of this ...”

“... in 1935 with Maurice Evans in Hamlet at the Old Vic, followed there by Laurence Olivier in Macbeth and, at the Golders Green Hippodrome, by John Gielgud in Richard II. I was also taken to things picked out by myself: the Crazy Gang in OK for Sound at the London Palladium and Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, after I had heard part of a broadcast of ...”