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“... from Lyubimov’s wish to know, while he was directing Pas-ternak’s translation of Hamlet, if an English translation of the text was available. The answer is that there is and there isn’t. Shakespeare’s text won’t disclose what Pasternak did to it in the course of translation. Versatile, even promiscuous, the capacious new-style matrioshka can also ...”

“... The Feminist Companion to Literature in English is itself the product of impressive feminist companionship. Listed in the preamble are three editors, four consulting editors, 12 contributing editors, and 54 ‘contributors’ – all women, all university teachers. Academic addresses range over three continents (Asia and Africa are missing, although women writers from those corners of the world are generously represented ...”

“... dominant image. For him, the present rot can be traced directly to the 1960s: specifically to Richard Neville’s Play Power, with its demonic slogan ‘the weapons of revolution are obscenity, blasphemy and drugs.’ Holbrook still sees that era – which began with the 1960 Lady Chatterley acquittal and ended with the Gay News prosecution in 1976 – as ...”

“... Revolution. On the one hand, the American colonists (who were themselves a medley of Scots, Irish, English, Welsh and Germans) might never have won had they not secured aid and auxiliaries from the French, Spanish and Dutch empires. Conversely, British troops (who were also a medley of Scots, Irish, English, Welsh and ...”

“... imaginations as soon as translations first appeared – in French between 1704 and 1717, and in English from 1708. Oriental fever swept through salons and coffee-houses, the offices of broadsheet publishers and theatrical impresarios; the book fired a train of imitations, spoofs, turqueries, Oriental tales, extravaganzas. It changed tastes in dress and ...”

“... by genre created problems as well as solving them. Their strategy of grouping all the plays about English history, whether comic or tragic in structure, and placing them in chronological order by subject-matter, all neatly titled after the name of the appropriate reigning monarch, made Shakespeare’s contributions to the development of the chronicle play ...”

“... restore. I cannot help liking better than buggery the ‘Switch-Hitter’ which Peter gave to the English language (no remote controls in Castleknock in his day). Peter’s vanity was consistent with his more golden qualities. Brian Sewell’s suggestion that Kirsten should have minded about his marriage with Susan is entirely disproved by the reality of ...”

“... monumental revolution is not much to Marcus’s taste either. We hear little or nothing about the English Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, nothing about the Soviet or the Chinese Revolutions. These are all out of court because Marcus is after something at once more catastrophic and more insignificant: the Sex Pistols, Dada, the ...”

“... they still represented 12 per cent of all American movies. But if the year that brought Richard Nixon’s triumphant re-election was the last in which the number of Western releases would reach double figures, the residual significance of the West as the bedrock of American identity was eloquently reiterated, just before the collapse of Soviet ...”

“... Beechcombings is a very different book from Woodlands, and rather suffers from the comparison. Richard Mabey’s intention is to use a series of ‘discursive essays’ to build up ‘a brief history of the narratives we’ve constructed about trees over the past thousand years to make them accessible, useful, comprehensible and obedient’, and to use the ...”

“... that his verses were not much good. Latin verse composition was a mental reflex for most educated English men, and for a significant number of women too, in the period from 1500 to 1800. In the later part of that period it was exercise for the mind, a test of its vigour, and an index of civility. In the early 16th century, though, Neo-Latin verse was much ...”

“... In these columns six years ago, among a chorus of praise for the new, revised Oxford English Dictionary, OED2, Charlotte Brewer entered a dissenting opinion (3 August 1989): The riches stored in the two previous dictionaries are now much more accessible, and reviewers have already reported how delightful it is to browse through one of the 20 handsome volumes of OED2, and ponder, marvel or cavil at individual words and definitions among the extraordinary wealth of examples recorded on its pages ...”

“... The​ posthumous progress in English of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is marked by deaths: those of his majoritarian and minoritarian translators David McLintock and Ewald Osers, in 2003 and 2011 respectively; and in 2015 that of Carol Brown Janeway, his publisher at Knopf, his unlikely champion over decades (because, for all his influence and cultishness, Bernhard in English never exactly sold), and the translator herself of the posthumous My Prizes, in an exquisitely bound volume from Notting Hill Editions, with a justly amused introduction by Frances Wilson: ‘Few writers have received more applause than Thomas Bernhard, Austrian novelist, playwright and enfant terrible, and few have bitten more sharply the hand that clapped ...”

“... recognise here the subject-matter of the Great Dane joke – the emigré dachshund, spurned by the English dogs in the park, who insists that back in Berlin he had been a Great Dane. There were those, even less fortunate, who did not make it at all: arriving penniless and with little knowledge of English, they ended up on ...”

“... a tale of flight, family separation and reunion scattered across the waters and cities of what Richard Halpern called ‘the decaying Hellenistic world’. At its core is the romance arc of a prince, Pericles (whose motto, In hac spe vivo, means ‘In this hope I live’), losing and then finding his wife and daughter: a wife seemingly buried at sea, but ...”