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“... triumphant eclecticism’. Among the figures he mentions are, of course, Anquetil-Duperron and Sir William Jones, the founder of Indology, whose researches on the Orient, Hinduism and the Sanskrit language include translations from – and, in effect, the recovery of – the great fourth-century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa. Yet Said is hard on Jones – ‘whereas ...”

“... Jonathan Rée takes some tomfoolery from Shakespeare for his title and uses it to create his own striking metaphor. The middle part of his book is about sign languages for the deaf: voices that one sees. The same trope served Oliver Sacks in Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (1989), but there is more to it than that for Rée ...”

“... of delay have even more sinister pay-offs: ‘the law’s delay’. In his justly celebrated Arden Shakespeare edition of the play, published in 1982, Harold Jenkins looks at the vast literature that has already appeared on the subject of ‘delay’ in Hamlet, and reminds the reader that many critics have found it an exhausted subject that should be put ...”

“... and his voice – once richly modulated, now trembly. In 1971 he agreed to act in The Old Boys by William Trevor at the Mermaid; the crew fitted him with an invisible prompter attached to an earpiece. At the first public performance the prompter malfunctioned, sending out a loud hissing, leaving both Redgrave and the audience in a state of high anxiety. The ...”

“... to appear of the mammoth Life of Mahomet from Original Sources by the Scottish Orientalist Sir William Muir, a colonial administrator in India’s Northwest Provinces. Muir drew on the eighth-century hagiographer Ibn Ishaq, the Persian scholar al-Tabari, and the ninth-century biographers Ibn al-Waqidi and Ibn Sa‘d, pre-eminent authors of the sira, the ...”

“... the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang/With grimful glee …’ Frank Auerbach to William Feaver And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang With grimful glee: ‘This life so free Is the thing for me!’ And the constable smiled, and said no word. Thomas Hardy, ‘At the Railway Station, Upway’ I remember​ the first time I saw, or ...”

“... William Empson maintained that there was a right and a wrong moment to bring theory into the business of intelligent reading, and that the professionals chose the wrong one, but he could not do without theory altogether. His book The Structure of Complex Words (1951) contains quite a lot of it; so it is not surprising that a generation of literary theorists, not wishing to remain totally out of touch with the best critic of his time, has decided to appropriate Complex Words, a work hitherto much less influential than the very early (and prodigious) Seven Types of Ambiguity ...”

“... It is true, as a relatively brief period of teaching shows, that every time you read a Shakespeare play it looks rather different – while also looking much the same; you never step twice into exactly the same text. But there is still something to be said for the assumptions behind Yeats’s phrase, ‘monuments of unageing intellect’. We ...”

“... towns, shops, sports, epochs, writers, eatables. Public Schools come next to Pubs, and Sex next to Shakespeare, both of which are appropriate neighbours. P.G. Wodehouse comes in often, which is also appropriate. This book gave me great entertainment as I worked steadily through it. I got a surprise when I reached T. There was my own name. Examining more ...”

“... and great achievement was to have re-established creative connections with at least one aspect of Shakespeare, and with some of Shakespeare’s great contemporaries, notably Marlowe and Donne. Gunn, I believe, liked this notion, and Clive Wilmer endorses it in his excellent and too brief Introduction to The Occasions of ...”

“... restorer of Scottish history’. Does it matter that the notorious cry of ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ greeted Home’s tragedy in London, not Edinburgh? It does. A book worked up out of anecdotage and cursory research ought to get its stories right. Worse than slip-ups of fact, however, are mistaken or misleading effects. Kames and other ...”

“... resolved satisfactorily. The poems contained in Riding Lights evidently spring from a knowledge of Shakespeare and the great Metaphysicals, to which a touch of Thomas and a smack of Empson have been added for modernity’s sake. The effort to be colourful at all costs leads to such expressions as ‘the dank grass is tangled with the song / Squirmed from a ...”

“... annotated throughout. This would seem to be more evidence, if more is needed, that a lot of Shakespeare has been inadequately annotated – whether because editors are more interested, on the one hand, in establishing a text, and, on the other hand, in writing long introductions explaining what the play is about, than they are in explaining what ...”

“... when at school? In Surprised by Joy Lewis asserts of his boyhood’s most admired teacher, William Kirkpatrick, ‘the Great Knock’, that ‘the most casual remark was taken as a summons to disputation.’ And from Kirkpatrick he would appear to have received much of the colouring of his mind not only as a tutor, a lecturer and a ...”

“... of the beat women seem to have been their deaths. Dying was something they did rather well. William Burroughs’s wife Joan placed a glass on her head one night and challenged her husband to shoot it off with his pistol. Unfortunately, as Johnson laconically puts it, Burroughs’s ‘aim was off that night’. Then there was Elise Cowen, Johnson’s ...”