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“... you prefer the Brady Bunch to the Partridge family, for instance, as Uma Thurman wants to know of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, is simultaneously a test, a cultural allusion and a send-up of the whole idea of culture. The funniest moment in Pulp Fiction concerns Harvey Keitel, come to clean up after John Travolta and ...”

“... the voluntary death of lovers whose situation is not entirely hopeless – than to, say, Romeo and Juliet. His Tristan and Isolde are not, as in Gottfried von Strassburg’s poem, star-crossed lovers thwarted by the standard obstacles: that the man has slain a close relative of the woman; that the woman is betrothed to an older male relative of the man, to ...”

“... and more recently the Henry Irving Shakespeare (1892), or the versions of King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night and Hamlet released by Oberon Books in conjunction with productions by English Touring Theatre (2002-7) – this one does not claim the authority of specific recent performances for the texts it presents. Although its introductory materials ...”

“... stories that goose-girls always carried a stick, Sheila got one from a garden; at which point Juliet C. emerged and the two of them herded the geese up the Crescent, eventually penning them in the garden of No 70. One settled happily in the ornamental pond there, but the other, taking advantage of the not very long lawn, took off for home, presumably ...”

“... articulate. Biographers don’t forget the history of himself that Dryden was to have given John Aubrey, but that he never gave. Dryden adapted Shakespeare, out of confidence and from a sense of necessity. I have chosen Hamlet as a point of comparison between them – a comparison, after all, provoked by Dryden himself – for a reason best given by ...”

“... death, minority but important voices declare that they don’t care for shows. In 1661 John Evelyn noted that ‘the old plays’ like Hamlet were starting ‘to disgust this refined age’, and a decade later Dryden felt that the play smelled ‘a little too strongly of the buskin’ – the archaic theatrical boot. These are English Restoration ...”

“... was a love greater than that in the greatest motion picture I have ever seen – Romeo and Juliet.’ This was an unsolicited plug for a limp movie that had Shearer straining after girlishness at the age of 34. But then her whole life, and career, were a strain. Scott Fitzgerald said on Thalberg’s death, ‘The Golden Bowl is broken,’ and the same ...”

“... he declares his love for the consumptive girl next door; a very peculiar version of Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare’s own hand; a Racine letter describing a play he hopes to write about a third-century Corsican tight-rope walker. On occasions Roussel took active steps to preserve his own literary papers, depositing various manuscripts with his financial ...”

“... with another dog, Emily waded in at once while ‘several other animals,’ the Haworth stationer John Greenwood reported, ‘who thought themselves men, were standing looking on like cowards as they were.’ She forced the dogs apart, ‘dredg[ing] well their noses with pepper’ and sent them packing. When Branwell drunkenly set light to his ...”

“... serious new biography since Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life in 1994 and Juliet Barker’s The Brontës from the same year (biographies seem to come in generational bursts). All writers on the Brontës now benefit from Margaret Smith’s magisterial – much overdue – edition of Charlotte’s extant letters, published by Oxford in ...”

“... argued that it was ‘the most fun’, and that choosing it in preference to its rivals – Juliet Barker’s The Brontës and Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom – would set the cat among the pigeons. Was it really such a maverick choice? Might it not, rather, owe its appeal to a family resemblance with other popular literary modes ...”

“... nature is as much a political metaphor, an instrument for national contestation, as it is for John Clare and Ted Hughes. Critics such as Tom Paulin and Mina Gorji have drawn our attention to the ways in which nature becomes a metaphor for an embattled Englishness in Clare and Hughes; the unfinished ‘naturalness’ of nature is conflated with the ...”

“... does not treat the actual life of Welles or its salient circumstances: his collaborations with John Houseman and Joseph Cotten and Michéal Mac Liammóir; his affairs with Dolores Del Rio and Lena Horne, and his marriage to Rita Hayworth; complicated relationships, usually rounded up to some sort of friendship, with the great producers of the day who used ...”

“... in its elements. In his very first two tragedies, Titus Andronicus is a father, and Romeo and Juliet are children. The long rich series of what may be formally Shakespeare’s own invention, the English History Plays, work in Henry IV, I and II to a climax that could be subtitled ‘Fathers and Sons’. Implicit in these Histories from the first is a ...”