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“... be offered a choice of book and luxury to take to their desert island along with the records, plus Shakespeare and the Bible; the first luxury, chosen by the actress Sally Ann Howes, was garlic, distressingly rare in postwar Britain.Plomley continued to script the show for live broadcast until the mid-1950s, proud of his ability – after taking them for lunch ...”

“... a few inches of warm water). And of course there were books. Kezia instructed her in Darwin and Shakespeare, and she read Don Juan in secret under the bedcovers. The nearby Mechanics’ Institute library provided Dickens, Trollope and Austen, and when she took on the local post round Thompson realised that her love of solitary exploration was not only to be ...”

“... has gained recent ground. The ‘literature’ of the English Renaissance has normally meant Shakespeare and his fellow poets and playwrights, not the Book of Common Prayer or – in spite of the status that the period accorded to literary translation – the King James Bible. Donne and George Herbert were only the most conspicuous clergy-poets of their ...”

“... that he related them afterwards as if he had seen or taken part in them.’ He had been Byron and Shakespeare, the prize-fighter Jack Randall (who kept a pub in Chancery Lane). Now, letter by letter, language was torn from him. He described his condition to the documentary historian Agnes Strickland: ‘They have cut off my head and picked out all the letters ...”

“... despite the fact that he admired Ulysses, went regularly to Stravinsky’s ballets and quoted Shakespeare and Keats. He was also a talented linguist. There was more than a trace of class snobbery in Bloomsbury’s view of Coward and, as social nuance was one of his principal themes, he must have been well aware of it. Even while she was a little ‘in ...”

“... in fear of being forcibly circumcised. In pride of place is the portrait of Coryate engraved by William Hole; around its cartouche lounge a trio of bosomy courtesans, one of whom is shown vomiting over his head. Another illustration by Hole, inserted in the text, shows Coryate bowing in greeting to a famous Venetian courtesan, Margarita Emiliana. The ...”

“... and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and ...”

“... blood clots were Christopher Marlowe, violent, restless, brilliant, while the cancer would be Shakespeare, coming in many guises, dependable, sly, fully memorable. In painting, the blood clots would be Jackson Pollock, the cancer Barnett Newman. In Tory politics, Boris Johnson would be a blood clot; William Whitelaw, if ...”

“... and visual concretion but an almost abstract delight in language. This last combination is rare: Shakespeare and Keats have it. Take, for example, a phrase from his celebrated story, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ (1911): a miner lies dead in a living-room, stretched out in ‘the naive dignity of death’. Or a moment in Lawrence’s travel book about ...”

“... reassuring than not being bothered. We should not be ‘scamping our work’, as Housman accused Shakespeare of doing too often. Short-cuts are no good in the long run if one cares about ‘the truth of things’. Housman’s poetry, by the same token, is always more impressed by what actually happened than by what might have been (‘An excellent topic for ...”

“... indiscipline of democracy, admired the harmony of hierarchy; one of his favourite passages from Shakespeare was Troilus’ ‘speech on degree’: ‘Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark! What discord follows!’ He hated mass culture and often ranted about American moral decadence. The only place he felt at home in the United States was on ...”

“... not her real forename; ‘Crafts’ may be a tribute to Ellen Crafts, who with her husband, William, made a daring escape from slavery in 1848 disguised as a white male. Whoever ‘Hannah’ was, she lives now in the pages of her book, and we need to look within the text to find out who and what she was: and since it has many autobiographical ...”

“... at what Wordsworth called ‘getting and spending’. His phrasing sometimes sounds rather like William Blake, whose name and example as a London poet crops up quite a lot, or like Coleridge at his most indignant: this is a story of native genius held in thrall by the hostile forces of trade – what Hill refers to at one point, in a Poundian spirit, as the ...”

“... take note: tough-guy-hipster-fedora-favourers – Al Capone, Humphrey Bogart, J. Edgar Hoover, William S. Burroughs, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Depp – might all be considered unwitting imitators of Sarah Bernhardt.) 5. The Rampant (er … ) Erotomania. (One moment, Herr Doktor – cough cough – my throat is tickling me.) World famous by her late ...”