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“... who is probably 35 but perhaps 33 (736). He is not really interested in the domestic life of Shakespeare except that Shakespeare, at 18, married a woman eight or nine years older, already pregnant. Stephen is 22. Early in the book, when he is yearning for love on a beach (49), he expects the woman to take the ...”

“... and disdain. Thomas, who seemed small and effeminate, particularly beside his fierce brother William, was bound in early life to seek for love elsewhere: in a landscape, or in literature. It is, one might say, the old story. When the father died, his family became itinerant, shepherded by the cold mother. They went to Bath, where Thomas started to reveal ...”

“... For Oberon, Titania, Puck and their company in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are Middle Spirits; Shakespeare calls them fairies, Empson proposes, ‘to disarm the resistance of the spectators’, that is, to lure them by means of homely popular culture into a more dangerous world of heterodox speculation. Such speculation extends beyond the air speed of ...”

“... odd. Hadn’t it always just, well, existed? Surely, at his Stratford grammar school, the lad Shakespeare mugged up his Chaucer, if not the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and Pride and Prejudice like the rest of us? How otherwise could he have written plays full of ‘characters’ who, as all O and A-level candidates ...”

“... verse shape that almost all literate people would be able to identify, if only through having seen Shakespeare’s ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’ printed in the order of service at weddings. Most people of a certain age could recite a sonnet or two by Wilfred Owen, or Keats, or Shakespeare. How did this ...”

“... thus crucial to the whole story of the English 15th-century monarchy. This was well appreciated by Shakespeare, and Henry has a central role in three of the history plays, Richard II and Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2. For all that, Shakespeare does not give Henry much more than a pasteboard personality, clearly seeing more ...”

“... York, where, increasingly desperate to crack the cipher, he enlisted the cryptographic skills of William Newbold, a professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania, who spent years studying the manuscript under a microscope and came to believe that the glyphs concealed a second cipher – microletters encoded into each penstroke. Voynich was elated. ‘When the time ...”

“... with the laughter. Also the sense of huge verbal labour in them, which is always contrasted with Shakespeare’s agility and flow. This note is already sounded by Dryden, who styles Jonson the Virgil of English drama to Shakespeare’s Homer, and adds tellingly: ‘I admire him, but I love ...”

“... Eliot; some Bob Dylan; Samuel Johnson; much dazzle and many jokes; Keats-Byron-Tennyson-Dryden-Shakespeare-Beckett-Hill running giddily into each other; but each writer and observation given its space to illuminate and be illuminated into a radiant energy, which conveys, above all, that literature matters and that it also matters to get everything as right ...”

“... much that France still offers. There are writers he likes, most of them dead: Ronsard, John Clare, William Barnes (‘love of whose poems seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my contemporaries’), George Herbert, Vaughan, Crabbe, Hopkins, Whitman, Campion, Morris, Christina Rossetti, John Crowe Ransom, Wyndham Lewis, Louis ...”

“... schools by the age of 13. This would be in 1799 or 1800. While still at the schools he came across William Godwin, then running his ill-starred children’s books business. For Godwin he made a number of illustrations: the cuts for the first edition of the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare are his Godwin wrote a little book ...”

“... they look like? Like a brown and purple cloud-shadow spread out across the uplands, described by William Atkins in characteristically fine focus when he says of the North Yorkshire moors that ‘the new blooms were silverish specks; they were pale grey, beige and mint green. I picked a sprig, but the moor-purple visible from a distance was not a colour you ...”

“... an element of the standing critical wisdom. Many of his former antagonists have now moved to what William James thought of as the third phase in the assimilation of a threatening new idea. First they said it was absurd, then that it was peripheral, now they want to claim it as their own creation. So Bloom has in a sense won his battle. In doing so, he may ...”

“... On 19 October 1844 the overweight William Makepeace Thackeray – if his travel diary tells the truth – laboriously climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops and pasted up banners advertising Punch, ‘thus introducing civilisation to Egypt’. The Egyptians put up with this sort of thing. Thomas Holloway, the great pill-maker, is supposed to have introduced eupepsia to Egypt by advertising his product from the same vantage-point ...”

“... In A.P. Herbert’s enjoyable parody of Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Soho, there is, I think – unfortunately I no longer possess a copy but had a small part in it at school – the passage: ‘Man, like a pebble on a glacier, moves imperceptibly but always down.’ A.P. Herbert was not being serious, of course, but his words apply to some, perhaps most, of us, mentally, morally and physically as we grow older ...”