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“... intimately, more agonistically engaged with poetry than anybody else except possibly the youthful William Empson, whom at this time he greatly admired. And the whole business of criticism acquired a new and exhilarating quality. That gnarled manner of speaking or writing sounded serious, deliberate and urgent, a new way of stressing the high importance of the ...”

“... to the crowd at a John Lewis sale, and similar remarks were made about the Iraq War protests. William Morris, a leading figure in the SDF, was issued with a summons for obstruction in July 1886, six years after his firm had been commissioned to decorate the throne room at St James’s Palace. In a demonstration on the afternoon of 1 March ...”

“... plays with Edwin Björkman. Does Shaw dine with his neighbour George Wardle, manager of William Morris’s Merton works, in April 1887? Weintraub reminds us that Mrs Wardle, 26 years earlier, was acquitted in a sensational trial of the charge of murdering her lover. As Shaw grows more cavalier about keeping up the entries, Weintraub grows more ...”

“... Rev. John Home, whose Douglas gave rise to a Scottish roar from the pit: ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ There is word of parsonical whorings and slayings, of deep draughts in taverns and stews; there are all manner of clerical bruisers, men like the Revds Henry Bate and William Jackson, successive editors of ...”

“... Freud must be very unsettling to necessitate such cushions. Enright’s poem ‘Anecdote from William IV Street’ – about a request for the works of Freud and for an artwork of Jesus Christ – succeeds in its succinct ruefulness, the melting sentiment (as Eliot said of Goldsmith) just held in check by the precision of the language. But when telling us ...”

“... panelling and arrayed flags, all illuminated by stained-glass windows portraying Caxton, Shakespeare, Cranmer and Tyndale. You are in Stationers’ Hall, the centre of London’s old book trade. And here, beyond all the elegant joinery and ceremonial paraphernalia, lies the key to the emergence of piracy. It sits quietly in a modest muniments ...”

“... in her, of imagination against observation, which leads a poet like Tennyson to compare her to Shakespeare: a juxtaposition which is, on the face of it, and given their relative scale, as surprising in a different way as the junction with Kipling. But if we call Shakespeare our greatest literary artist, what makes him so ...”

“... learned Italian things, obscure histories and occult treatises. Like some other poets, including Shakespeare, he gives one the impression that what he read was more or less exactly what he needed for purposes of his own. He acquired much knowledge of Irish myth and folklore, which he contrived to amalgamate with his theories about that universal store of ...”

“... as a Vocation shows that applicants to Downing were expected already to have read large swathes of Shakespeare, 17th-century poetry, Romantic poetry and 19th-century fiction. Hilliard has dug up not only the entrance exams that Leavis set but also the reading suggestions he circulated to teachers: both would terrify the best of today’s English A-level ...”

“... a while. He quotes Mary’s opening to her version of The Tempest in the siblings’ Tales from Shakespeare – ‘There was a certain island in the sea, the only inhabitants of which were an old man, whose name was Prospero, and his daughter Miranda, a very beautiful young lady’ – and calls it ‘proto-Hemingway’; he also claims for her prose ‘the ...”

“... propaganda inclines us now to think that it was Henry VII and not Richard III who did them in. Shakespeare’s efforts are just as counter-productive here as any claim by the ministry of lies. In that context one of the oddest stories is ‘the horrid tale of the bloody Colonel Kirk’, as investigated by Disraeli’s father Isaac, the antiquarian. Colonel ...”

“... consequences? Bromwich bases most of his analysis of the Right on the writings of George Will and William Bennett, leaders of the ‘reactionary priesthood’ but not exactly intellectual giants. He argues that both clutched so-called traditional values obsessively to their breasts because they believed that only a traditional culture could provide a reliable ...”

“... Scandinavia, as Heather O’Donoghue points out, for a hundred years before that. Just the same, Shakespeare, for instance, can’t have known anything at all about Norse myth. Hamlet may, as O’Donoghue claims, go back to the story of Frodi’s mill and the giantess-slaves who grind at a magic stone there, as told in one of the few Eddic poems outside the ...”

“... Stuart’ tells the story of the descendant of Henry VII, forcibly separated from her husband, William Seymour, because of both parties’ threatening proximity to the throne. Hemans has Lady Arabella imprisoned and hallucinating, and what is remarkable in the poem is the way in which dreaming, remembering and hallucinating become confused. ‘Twas but a ...”

“... a riskiness about it that we don’t associate with the New Criticism. Unless of course we count William Empson as belonging to the school despite himself (he hated its axiomatic claim that ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art’) since his early criticism ...”