Search Results

“... after the rest of Eastern Europe had rejected Stalinism. Agim explained that he had grown tired of Shakespeare’s comedies. ‘Under Hoxha we had nothing but A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure ... what we need now are the tragedies ... to remind people what it was like.’ I wondered why Enver Hoxha, who broke off relations with ...”

“... Peters, Minister of Religion’ in 1983, getting seven questions right on his chosen subject (William Temple, former archbishop of Canterbury) and nine wrong. He claimed, falsely, to have written a book called Know Yourself. Simon Winchester blurbs Sisman’s book as an ‘utterly mad and wholly delightful story of chicanery and fantasy … which involves ...”

“... Tower Menagerie was not proof against the myths about animals which persisted down the centuries. Shakespeare helped to perpetuate one of these in II Henry VI, where Jack Cade says ‘I’ll make thee eat cast iron like an ostrich and swallow my sword like a great pin, ere thou and I part.’ A French bestiary encouraged the idea that ostriches could digest ...”

“... of a historical artefact as a punchbowl or a gateleg table, and blank verse before Marlowe and Shakespeare was not particularly expressive by our standards. This for instance from Gorboduc: This fire shall waste their love, their lives, their land, And ruthful ruin shall destroy them both, I wish not this (O King) so to befall, But fear the thing, that I ...”

“... was once famous, at that high noon when Robert Louis Stevenson thought Meredith second only to Shakespeare. Roy has become a sort of court jester for a German margravine and – to cut a long story short – has agreed to pose as a newly erected equestrian statue in bronze, so that she can win a bet. The ruse convinces everyone until Harry passes by the ...”

“... to grow in time together. The whole is bound together by the rich Renaissance epigraphs, from Shakespeare, Burton, Spenser, and Dekker, William Turner and Pierre Erondell, Drayton and Sidney, which like the buildings of the university town marshal a reader’s progress and whisper, in their proportions and through their ...”

“... tongues. How great a diversity, Swift can hardly have imagined; it needed the researches of a William Jones or a Wilhelm von Humboldt to begin to persuade literary Europeans that they were not quite the masters of the speaking world. Now we know better – well, perhaps just a little. We know that something like four thousand languages are spoken in the ...”

“... and argument’. At times, the argument bullies the art a bit, as in Donaldson’s discussion of Shakespeare’s ‘Rape of Lucrece’, but this is an absorbing and persuasive study, though it offers simply to tell ‘a story about a story’. The Roman Lucretia was raped by Tarquin, the king’s son, or rather blackmailed into submission by Tarquin’s ...”

“... logically are the abiding features of the English character, traceable in English literature from Shakespeare downwards.’ The profound patriotism of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what ...”

“... Spitting Image to present her forty years later as a gin-swilling commoner. Since then death and William Shawcross have done little to humanise her. His biography was pious to a degree and, like his equally fulsome edition of her letters, much too long.* Despite all of which a personality, powerful and in some ways admirable and unusual, manages to break ...”

“... hell – where the fires would keep burning for as long as there were sinners for incineration. In William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), which unearths utopia in 21st-century Hammersmith, the Houses of Parliament have been repurposed as a store for dung, while in Utopia itself, Thomas More specifies that Utopians use gold, which is abundant, for chamber ...”

“... of the fabled ‘Shadow’ himself. He was an enfant terrible in the theatre, with adaptations of Shakespeare, a negro Macbeth, a famous Mercury Julius Caesar and the banned The cradle will rock by Marc Blitzstein. The notorious radio production of The War of the Worlds and his epic compilation of Shakespeare’s History ...”

“... was ‘as British as the poetic landscapes between its covers’, which included those of Shakespeare, Thomas Gray, Wordsworth and the Border ballads. But it was British in a determinedly monolingual way (Palgrave even worried about including Burns’s Scottish dialect). He included nothing medieval (none of his poets was born before the ...”

“... did. Even the most full-throated monarchical warblers – the purest example in Nairn’s book is William Rees-Mogg – do not wish to argue that the Americans or, say, the Swiss ought to have a king. And many would probably be embarrassed to have the Windsors bracketed with the House of Saud or the Sultan of Brunei – although these are the only two ...”

“... them, thus proving himself a cunning ‘politician’ in the precise pejorative sense used by Shakespeare in King Lear: ‘Get thee glass eyes,/And, like a scurvy politician, seem/To see the things thou dost not.’ So while the message of these texts is clear enough, their provenance makes them hard to interpret. The proportion of truth and invention in ...”