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“... Act Three, Scene Three of Julius Caesar ends with the murder of a poet. It begins with a stage direction: Enter Cinna the poet, and after him the Plebeians. This direction creates two oppositions. The poet is opposed to the plebeians. And ‘Cinna the poet’ is opposed to ‘Cinna the conspirator’, a character with the same name but a different vocation ...”

“... that I shared a birthday with Charles Dickens, the Appalachian banjo-player Dock Boggs, and Julius Caesar. All other authorities seem to agree, however – and it’s only just occurred to me to check this – that Julius Caesar was born in the middle of July. Unhelpfully, few of them say which calendar ...”

“... had other ideas, however. She had presumably witnessed Roman triumphs during her stay in Rome as Julius Caesar’s amant en titre and well understood their techniques of humiliation. She would also have known that the most dangerous and distinguished of Rome’s victims never reached the end of the procession: they were put to death in the Forum, just ...”

“... hero. The comparison may sound pretentious, but then Evans compares McEnroe to Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, with quotations from Shakespeare and from Peter Levi on Shakespeare. He uses adjectives like ‘pavonine’, and describes McEnroe’s style as pointilliste – rather a good idea, except that it leads to an analysis of pointillism: ‘tiny ...”

“... against a view of Shakespeare as a poet who transcends his age.’ In 1599, Shapiro reads Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet as texts written solely to ‘show … the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’. He cites this remark of Prince Hamlet’s as evidence that ‘Shakespeare certainly thought of his art in this ...”

“... people and events were written up by ancient historians whose works have survived: historians like Julius Caesar, who chronicled his own conquest of France in a deceptively simple style that long ago endeared him to teachers of Level-1 Latin; or Caesar’s Level-2 protégé Sallust, whose endless variety of ...”

“... Consider​ the many things that would not exist without Caesar’s account of the Gallic Wars: Asterix and Obelix; The Wicker Man; Gauloises cigarettes; the little Airfix Romans and Britons that many of us grew up with. Even today, Caesar’s legionaries and their colourful Gallic foes are bread and butter for companies that sell expensive toy soldiers to middle-aged schoolboys ...”

“... Medical Officer … . . Leonato (Much Ado about Nothing) Force-Feeding Doctor … . . Varro (Julius Caesar) Behavioural Health Doctor … . . Cordelia (King Lear) Behavioural Health Doctor … . . Cressida (Troilus and Cressida) Psychiatrist … . . Helena (All’s Well That Ends Well / A Midsummer Night’s Dream) Medical Corpsman … . . Silius ...”

“... political figures in Rome in the hundred years of civil war that led up to the assassination of Julius Caesar. The head of Antony’s own grandfather was said to have graced the dinner table of Gaius Marius in one of the pogroms of the early first century BC. A cousin of Cicero had his severed head (‘still alive and breathing’, in Cicero’s ...”

“... libraries and his longstanding insider status at court. Suetonius began with the career of Julius Caesar, whose rise to political supremacy 170 years earlier had marked the end of republican Rome. His sequence finished with the emperor Domitian, after whose assassination in the year 96 power passed to the Nerva-Antonine dynasty, for whom Suetonius ...”

“... elder Scaliger’, there must have been readers who asked themselves whether he wasn’t confusing Julius Caesar Scaliger, one of the 16th century’s most formidable literary scholars, and his son Joseph, who, as it happens, was successor to Lipsius at Leiden. And if their distinctive styles of pedantry make the two of them discernible to connoisseurs of ...”

“... from him. When he was 18, and still called Octavius, Augustus had been adopted by his great-uncle Julius Caesar into the ancient clan of the Iulii, who had supposedly come to Rome from Alba Longa and claimed descent from Iulus, the son of Aeneas, grandson of Venus. Exactly how long the Iulii had been making this claim is uncertain – perhaps they only ...”

“... epic also known as Pharsalia), Nigidius Figulus predicts the outcome of the struggle between Julius Caesar and Pompey through a series of learned observations of the heavens. He notes Mars’s dominant position in the sky and the brightness of Orion’s sword. The upshot is grim. Rome is about to succumb to harrowing civil war: ‘The power of the ...”

“... uneven collection’, as James Romm writes in his engaging preface to The Age of Caesar, which has nonetheless provided ‘a model for modern moral essayists, including Montaigne and Emerson’. Plutarch’s Lives exerted an even greater influence. They can be imagined as a gallery, one spacious wing housing individual portraits of Roman ...”

“... puzzled by the fact that Cleopatra should have concealed more than half her property from Octavius Caesar’s prying eyes (as the steward Seleucus reveals) if she was really intent on death. The strange thing here is that Barton writes as if there were no obvious answer to hand – but, famously, there is. In Shakespeare’s principal source for Antony and ...”