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“... It’s probably a good thing that we know so little about Shakespeare’s personal life. What biographical information we have concerns leases, wills, marriage lines, property. His pillow-talk with Anne Hathaway, Emilia Lanier or Mr W. H., interesting as it may have been, was not recorded. If you want to discuss Shakespeare, you have to depend on reading and seeing his work ...”

“... Sacrilege sanctifies.’ Under this heading Brecht cheerfully sums up what happens to plays, like Shakespeare’s, that outlast their own time – and what may now be happening to his own: What keeps the classical plays alive is the use made of them, even if it’s misuse. In the schoolroom morals are squeezed out of them: in the theatre they provide the vehicles for self-seeking actors, ambitious Lord Chamberlains and profiteers out to make money from evening entertainments ...”

“... labels to people or take political sides. But, in the light of the general argument advanced by Margot Heinemann in Puritanism and Theatre, it may be that we should also regard it as the quite natural response of a man less committed than Jonson to the royalist or ‘court’ party. Shakespeare had at least one patron (William Herbert, third ...”

“... of the period: ‘it is a great compliment that people who are reactionary fear it so much.’ Margot Heinemann writes with exceptional authority on MacNeice, John Cornford and Clive Branson; there are studies of left-wing theatre, and of the Left Review and the Left Book Club; and, only a little to the side, a very judicious article, by Iain ...”

“... male society’. John Cornford fought in Spain as a zealous young Communist, but his letters to Margot Heinemann reflect the same first-term-in-a-new-school excitement, the same all-male exhilaration. ‘I did quite well that day,’ he said of his success in rescuing a gun from the enemy. ‘He did well here, and died bloody well,’ he observed on ...”

“... ends with a series of essays by Alan Sinfield, Graham Holderness and Margot Heinemann which analyse the propagation of the Shakespeare myth in modern Britain in the theatre, the cinema, television and the schools. The gradual replacement in all these areas of the old stiffly patriotic Shakespeare by a more ...”

“... difficult to take altogether seriously. This sense of unreality deepens somewhat in the chapter by Margot Heinemann on the literary ‘broad alliance against Fascism’, particularly in reference to the Spanish Civil War. How poignant are the remnants of party discipline which enable this testimony to omit, from the list of significant British writers ...”

“... to establish a second household with children in the 1930s with Margaret Gardiner and a third with Margot Heinemann in the 1950s, both of whom also survived him. Though the originality of his mind was astonishing, his progress as a scientist was curiously uneven. Forced to shift from mathematics to physics, he failed to get a first-class physics ...”

“... produced a son and a daughter) was never dissolved, even after Margaret Gardiner was supplanted by Margot Heinemann as his domestic companion. In addition to these relatively durable relationships, Goldsmith says that Bernal was a ‘great lover’ and had ‘given pleasure to many women’, and that ‘when he travelled abroad his hosts, especially the ...”

“... poetry from Sidney and Spenser to Herbert and Milton. Middleton belongs to the same tradition. Margot Heinemann, in her influential account of Puritanism and Theatre (1980), established Middleton’s links with the oppositional politics of 17th-century Puritanism; now, John Strachniewski – in one of several excellent essays in R.V. Holdsworth’s ...”

“... working with James Klugmann for a front organisation of the Comintern, and the future historian Margot Heinemann are casually mentioned. Of the former, Hobsbawm delphically remarks, ‘What did one know about him? He gave nothing away’; of the latter, he says simply, ‘she probably had more influence on me than any other person I have ...”

“... of some use for this purpose.’ On 7 July, he expressed his frustration in a call to his friend Margot Heinemann, a senior party member whose phone, Holborn 4071, was tapped by MI5: M: You are still doing the same job, are you? E: Yes, with knobs on, well anyway with knobs off! M: Off! E: Well about as tucked away as I can possibly ...”