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“... teaching in schools, in the Leavis manner, via pairings of admirable against deplorable texts: John Clare compared with ‘a film song’; Mark Twain versus a shampoo advertisement; but also Donne versus Shelley. Because he founded his literary criticism on social criticism, deploring the effects of industrialisation in ...”

“... are however assailed, reasonably enough, in the persons of directors like Peter Brook and John Barton whose productions are determined by Kott’s or some other’s attempts to find in Shakespeare 20th-century ‘relevance’. Next man up is Stanley Fish, author of Surprised by Sin, Self-Consuming Artefacts and Is there a text in this class? Fish is a ...”

“... these 16 years, and although his voice was often recorded it now seems difficult to describe it. John Haffenden says he had one voice for poetry and another for prose. Empson himself thought ‘the reader should throw himself into the verse, and not do it with “reserved” English good taste.’ The best idea was to ham it ‘like a provincial Shakespeare ...”

“... the 1790s (which included a letter from Elizabeth I thanking him for his ‘prettye Verses’) and John Payne Collier in the 1830s and 1840s (which showed Shakespeare to have been a well-connected member of metropolitan literary circles from an early stage). But for Shapiro the real villain is Edmond Malone. The usual story is that Malone, as he himself ...”

“... emotional complexity of some of his lyrics is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s sonnets, or of Donne, though in their ironic simplicity of surface they are closer to his near-contemporary, Marvell. And if he is the last important Metaphysical poet, his satires give him a good claim as one of the first of the Augustans.’ That could hardly be better ...”

“... side on the podium translating his words as he speaks, rubs shoulders with Jerzy Kosinski, John Lennon and Arthur Cohen.) The cast of other characters is often barely credible, a hint perhaps that there is invention and embellishment in the seeming straight-talk: Casey and Teddy, ‘a couple of clowns from the days of vaudeville and silent ...”

“... still policed its own members and more than a few were called to the bar for going too far. Sir John Coventry, whose story is told in Patterson’s dazzling prelude, might not have had his nose slit open, supposedly with the king’s approval, if he had been disciplined by his peers for casting aspersions on the king’s morals. The privacy of debate was ...”

“... icecream? Is O’Leary of the Police Department on the level? (An Irish-American, he is, like John F. Kennedy, ‘not much better than ourselves’.) Who is the dame on the phone who tells the narrator to come to the Atlantic Club between six and seven: ‘And when you come, to come alone’? Why the allusions to The Tempest? As you can see, Muldoon is ...”

“... in the seas entrall.After Spenser a little Hakluyt, the obligatory Psalm 107, some Chapman, Donne, Dryden and so to Addison, whose Spectator essay, in the editor’s opinion, raised the sea, with its ‘agreeable horrour’, to the category of Sublime, thus (with a great deal of help from Burke’s On the Sublime and Beautiful) doing much to fix the ...”

“... bottles, he was being much funnier with werewolves and tigers. Our little dialogues were between John and Mary; his, and how much better, between Bertie van Tahn and the Baroness. Even the most casual intruder into one of his sketches, as it might be our Tomkins, had to be called Belturbet or de Ropp, and for his hero, weary man-of-the-world at 17, nothing ...”

“... MPs are unlikely to have been reassured by the activities of Thomas Tany, ‘Theaureau John’. Informed by nocturnal revelations that God had commissioned him to gather the dispersed Jews and lead them to the Holy Land, Tany proceeded to establish assembly camps at Greenwich and Lambeth, ‘tents for every tribe, and the figures of every tribe ...”

“... but a book of that title which omitted Chaucer and Shakespeare, Spenser and all the Elizabethans, Donne and nearly all the Jacobeans, while including a host of nonentities, such as Pomfret, Stepney, Dyer, Smith, Duke and King, was at the very least defective and misleading. The fault was not Dr Johnson’s. The guilty men, as a contemporary noted, were not ...”

“... big morose Ajax in Troilus and Cressida (with, according to Honigmann, the diminutive epigrammist John Weever as Thersites). Others say Jonson is a model for Jaques, the embittered satirist of Arden (‘They that are most galled with my folly, They most must laugh’). Riggs offers, rather unconvincingly, Malvolio in Twelfth Night. The richest contemporary ...”

“... his subject is less clearly focused. But it is an engrossing one. He sets out, in the footsteps of John Harrison, Harvey Gross, William Chace and others, to explain and explore the connections between Modernist literature, as practised by Pound, Eliot and Yeats, and reactionary politics. Others – Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis – could have been included, but ...”

“... a recently made friend, Christopher Middleton. They had only two books with them, a collection of Donne’s poems and Pound’s Cantos. ‘Neither of us, I think, had much notion as to what the long poem was about,’ Davenport remembered, ‘except that it had strangeness and beauty in great measure. It, like Donne, was ...”