“... an abject retreat into a feat of everyday British pluck, which the writer and broadcaster Nicholas Harman later called ‘the necessary myth’. Reports of the fighting at Dunkirk, when they eventually began to emerge, often described a situation unrecognisable to the men who were there. A BBC commentary accused German broadcasting of perpetrating a ...”

“... he died at forty, probably of tuberculosis, he left his manuscript of English poems to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, leader of the spiritual community at Little Gidding, to publish or destroy as he saw fit. Ferrar found it worth publishing. What was George Herbert like? ‘Saintly’ is a misleading adjective: saints often have difficult personalities. The ...”

“... that this is all a normal part of university life. 6 August, Oxford. Today is cool and grey (‘Shakespeare in the park weather’, someone says) which is perhaps fortunate as we have to get through eighteen or so set-ups in the day, the normal quota for a feature film some five or six. Still, everybody is greatly encouraged from having seen last night a ...”

“... punting Elvis memorabilia, pubs touting exotic lunchtime entertainment, while boasting that Bill Shakespeare had been a regular. (Bricklayer/playwright Ben Jonson of the customised moniker, it’s true, killed a man in these streets and got off by pleading benefit of clergy.) Shoreditch survived as a prophylactic, an interzone protecting the City of London ...”

“... worked. As he told Sean O’Casey, when rejecting The Silver Tassie for performance at the Abbey, Shakespeare did not fill Hamlet and Lear with his own beliefs, but gave those characters a life that allowed them to educate him. It is crucial, in other words, to triangulate biographical data with the polarities of meaning in the play. Once the Old Man’s son ...”

“... she wins a Fulbright scholarship; she meets Ted Hughes and marries him. Two roses, Frieda and Nicholas. If we could read it all simultaneously – journals, letters, stories, poems – a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s ...”

“... many: ‘Fielding’s is the Comic Spirit we meet in Chaucer, but in few other English authors (Shakespeare is too brittle or too deep, Dickens too dark).’ His understanding of literary history seems insecure. Fielding’s defence, as quoted from a letter to Harris, of prose against the heroic couplet is not in the least ‘like Wordsworth in his Preface ...”

“... hardly conveys the sense of a single type of human value. As for the Renaissance – Montaigne, Shakespeare ... There is no mystery about all this. What Berlin has overlooked is the simple sociological fact that any society with a moderate division of labour is virtually bound to develop discourses justifying different roles within it. Out of them, literary ...”

“... he called the poetical character and its lack of identity, an ideal egolessness he attributed to Shakespeare (who had been capable of entirely subordinating himself to the characters he wrote) and sometimes called ‘negative capability’: ‘that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact ...”

“... fewer children.’ The piece discusses a widely cited paper by Seth Wynes and Kimberly Nicholas published in Environmental Research Letters in which the researchers considered ‘a broad range of individual lifestyle choices’ and came up with recommendations for four ‘high impact’ actions which had ‘the potential to contribute to systemic ...”