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“... There’s​ a Northern Irish joke about an Englishman who finds himself in Protestant Belfast on 12 July, the anniversary of William of Orange’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne. Puzzled by what he sees, the man accosts a local:‘I say, what’s going on here?’‘It’s the Twalth!’‘I beg your pardon … The twelfth?’‘Ay, the Twalth ...”

“... In 1598 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were forced to dismantle James Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch, which they had occupied since their foundation in 1594, so they transported it across the Thames and built their own playhouse on the Bankside. This was the building whose 20th-century replica was christened ‘Shakespeare’s Globe’. The possessive might have surprised Richard and Cuthbert Burbage, who between them owned half the Globe, whereas Shakespeare’s portion amounted to a tenth; but that stake was enough to make him a member of the ‘housekeepers’ whose investments set them apart from the mere ‘sharers’ in the company ...”

“... Memory,’​ my mother remarked, distress masked by her usual self-mocking humour, ‘is a thing of the past.’ She was 85 and sliding into the dementia that would ultimately erase all remembrance. Increasingly haunted by the fear that she had, literally, nothing to say, nervous of gaps in conversation, she would make things up, their frequently bizarre character a reminder that social inhibition is itself a function of deep-laid memories: ‘Oh, the royal family? Of course they suffer from all sorts of unmentionable diseases, you know ...”

“... Perhaps​ the first ever ‘lifestyle magazine’, Country Life was founded in 1897 to cater for the leisured interests of the upper class, and was devoted to articles on golf and racing, leavened with discreet advertisements for manorial estates. Now a subsidiary of Time Inc., it has become a lavishly ornamented real estate window for the 1 per cent, and for those who dream of joining that porcine elite, its readers thrilling at what a mere £18 million might buy them in Surrey, Tuscany, Florida or the Côte d’Azur ...”

“... Anne Barton​ delivered the lectures on ‘The Shakespearean Forest’ that form the basis for this, her much anticipated last book, in Cambridge in 2003. The Clark Lectures were themselves the product of an extended reflection on the significance of Shakespeare’s imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays ...”

“... I must needs acknowledge, that the Greeke and Latine tongues, are great ornaments in a Gentleman, but they are purchased at over-high rate. Montaigne, Essays I grew up​ in postwar Northern Ireland and at the age of eight, when it was time for proper education to begin, I was loaded onto a train at Belfast Central and shunted across the border to Aravon, a dismal institution in Co ...”

“... The 17th-century church of St Michan’s in Dublin is a dull enough building, known for the curious human remains preserved in the exceptional dryness of its ancient crypt. When I was taken to see the celebrated ‘St Michan’s mummies’, 60 years ago, I already knew of the church from M.R. James, whose tales of supernatural terror entirely possessed my nine-year-old imagination ...”

“... It is an excellent principle, in literature as in life, to judge a book by its cover; and there is much to be learned from the appearance of the new Oxford Middleton. Even as the blurb declares that Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino’s monumental collection is ‘based on the award-winning design of the Oxford Shakespeare’, the binding and dust jacket defiantly proclaim its difference from that distinguished model ...”

“... For some extraordinary reason, the men won’t drink this – but you might like it.’ Holding out a jug of cloudy bitter, still sludgy with hops, our employer stood framed indignantly in the doorway that separated her kitchen from the servants’ quarters. The ‘men’ were the other ranks among the annual tranche of recruits preparing to serve her husband in the British Antarctic Survey: they were expected to drink beer in the hall, while the officer class took cocktails in the drawing-room ...”

“... to ‘discover’ extinction in the sense of gaining actual experience of the phenomenon. But, as Michael Neill points out, human beings do imagine dying and in the process they inevitably invent a notion of death capable of matching their presuppositions. To that extent, death could be said to be something that each society discovers for itself. As a ...”

“... Well, I have some, Paul. As I was reading his book I remembered that my former colleague, Michael Neill, now a professor of English at the University of Auckland, had looked after Naipaul on his visit to New Zealand in 1972, and that he used to lecture on Rochester. But otherwise the person portrayed was unrecognisable. A few days later I ran ...”

“... book did not make the national news. Country Life, however, managed that feat when, as Michael Neill discussed in the last issue of the LRB, it devoted its May issue to the horticulturalist Mark Griffiths’s contention that the title page of John Gerard’s Herball of 1598 contained a portrait of Shakespeare. This led to headline variations ...”

“... Euripides’ play so compelling. In Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (reviewed in the LRB by Michael Neill, 19 March), Colin Burrow described the way Seneca’s blood-soaked play about Medea haunts not only Macbeth, King Lear and The Tempest, but even A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Seneca tilts the audience’s response towards not pity or empathy but ...”

“... you’re recognising everyone’s rights when you’re not. The film is District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp and written by the director and Terri Tatchell, and of course the South African resonances are everywhere, sparked by the setting if nothing else. But the question of the aliens, insofar as it has any allegorical reach at all, as distinct from a ...”

“... Thompson, it was ‘a group of fat, rich nations feeding each other goodies’. Barbara Castle, Michael Foot and Tony Benn led a powerful Labour campaign against the Common Market, in itself a pejorative term on the left. But Roy Jenkins and others on Labour’s centre-right emphasised reconciliation with former enemies, highlighting in particular the ...”