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“... drawn to Henry V’s soliloquy before the Battle of Agincourt, yet does not seem to realise that Shakespeare was parading both the vanity and the vainglory of kingship. He seems to think, in his more arrogant moments, that he can walk on water, but he also possesses a remarkable capacity for shooting himself in the foot. And in marrying Lady Diana ...”

“... and Trevor Phillips’s history of postwar black England. Early arrivals who had been weaned on Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Dickens imagined the metropolis as ancient and archival. They had peered at celluloid images of its citadels and monuments on the Movietone newsreels screened before the main features at their local Empire Theatre fleapit. They had ...”

“... moral philosophers based their arguments on self-evident truths. (An unclerical example is Sir William Temple, in his essay on Epicurus.) It was also commonly agreed that few men bowed voluntarily to the constraints of morality; nearly all had to be driven into it by supernatural warnings. Objectors, like Shaftesbury and his followers, were audible but ...”

“... with factual errors, is hopelessly uncritical, and largely derives from the work of writers like William Blisset and Herbert Knust. I would have added John DiGaetani’s Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel, which was published four years earlier, but Martin claims that a book of that title ‘by Bernard di Gaetani’ was ‘under preparation at the ...”

“... a speaker’s intention’ has at best only a trivial relevance to literature. A phone call from Shakespeare might disambiguate a tricky line, but it could not disambiguate Hamlet, which, it might be maintained, is undisambiguable. Juhl, however, wishes to apply his rule to all literary works, including Finnegans Wake. All are speech acts, and to be ...”

“... Westmorland hills; Hardy too, haunting his Wessex ways, A pastoral order dying in his gaze, and William Yeats – a ‘stubborn and age-angry man’ – who laughed ‘with rod and can’. Hall attributes vain powers by falsely calling these poets ‘lords/ Of a landscape’; this sort of tribute does neither living nor dead any ...”

“... Yale and Harvard, ‘more decadently turns sport into ballet’, though why myth, religion or Shakespeare are not also made ‘decadent’ by the same transformation goes unexplained, unless for Conrad ballet itself is ‘decadent’. At first, Kipling and Stevenson were happy that America was an alternative to the Victorian novel, since they were looking ...”

“... we may consider the following passage dating from 1895 on a painting then in the collection of Sir William Farrer but today in the Ashmolean Museum: perhaps the freshest and most charming, as well as the earliest of all Montagna’s existing works ... the child is thin-haired, large-headed, and chubby-limbed. His ear has the nick in the cheek so rarely absent ...”

“... heretical books. Chief among the writers of these and among More’s English antagonists was William Tyndale, Luther’s chief English disciple – if it is fair to call anyone so combative and individual the disciple of anyone. In the preface to his translation of the Pentateuch, made in 1530, Tyndale tells us how he had determined to translate the New ...”

“... would remodel itself perpetually, like a transformer or a superchangeling: an unrealisable ideal William Burroughs brought down to the affordability of ordinary people in his proposal for the cut-up book, which you could simply rearrange at home according to your fancy. But The Invisible in Architecture is closer to these ideal images than the literary works ...”

“... stuff and nonsense indeed.) Malcolm traces the comic uses of Marlowe’s style by writers from Shakespeare to Thomas Nashe, whose insanely eloquent, near-Joycean tribute to the Yarmouth herring-smoking industry, Lenten Stuff, only just escapes being classified as nonsense, but the crucial mediating figure between Marlowe and the sheer nonsense of the ...”

“... fears for his family and disillusionment with the practical realities of becoming a Muslim William Wallace in somebody else’s war stifled his yearning to be a righteous soldier. During the Bosnian conflict he visited the barracks of the Kateebah mujahedin, the Bosnian foreign legion, but stayed only three weeks and did not fight, although he ...”

“... a range of theoretical essays, and works of literary theory criticising French drama and promoting Shakespeare as a worthy successor to the ancient Greek tragedians. But he was a dramatist first and last, widely respected for a series of increasingly serious and original plays, beginning in 1755 with Miss Sara Sampson, a tragedy of ordinary life set in an ...”

“... from Hamlet, Phèdre or Faust can be made to yield more, and more decisive information about Shakespeare, Racine or Goethe and their times than would a systematic … treatment of their lives and works. Indeed, the present book may be cited as an illustration. The important words are ‘can be made to yield’, since the doctrine has been much abused ...”

“... been some clever and readable tweaks on the model for earlier writers, by whom I essentially mean Shakespeare (a year in the life of, a day in the life of), but even the most brilliant have served up the same formula: sub-novelistic sentences of high drama follow (unsubstantiated) assertions of scholarly authority, with a dash of murder, intrigue, vivid ...”