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“... a Word.Rejoice! We are ruled thru’ infinityBy this highly dysfunctional Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a ...”

“... a civilisation that can be established without the creative energies born of sexual repression. George Bickersteth, Empson’s colonial administrator, is an intelligent human and sexually quite ordinary; he gives up a native mistress and brings out a wife from a rectory. She is quite attracted to Wuzzoo, whom she teaches English, and he has to explain what ...”

“... and are consequently edited with a sometimes excessive devotion, as when a passing reference to Macbeth elicits a note explaining, to readers who can’t possibly need such help, what that play is about. It was with pittances earned by such pieces that Yeats and Olivia eventually bought a bed in Tottenham Court Road, their embarrassment augmented when they ...”

“... and prophets, or holy kings in Shakespeare – kings like Duncan and Edward the Confessor in Macbeth, Lincoln’s favourite play. Vidal’s novel is largely about the way in which Lincoln became an image of ‘greatness’ to his people. Among British readers of this patriotic American book the most fortunate will be those who have read little about ...”

“... doing in Leavis’s The Great Tradition, cheek by jowl with impeccable liberal humanists such as George Eliot and Henry James. Chaudhuri is right to see that this ‘decentring’ of the dominative ego is in one sense to be prized: it belongs with Lawrence’s magnificent sense of what Heidegger calls Gelassenheit, that capacity simply to let things be, to ...”

“... to make the acquaintance of the infant Rosalind, Portia the toddler and the pre-pubescent Lady Macbeth. But extensive as the ‘improvements’ and revisions and adaptations of Shakespeare have been, from Tate to Aimé Césaire and Tom Stoppard, they have not been carried out in recent years with the same pointed zeal as have the sequels to Austen. In the ...”

“... on that always earnestly unreal type of state-of-the-nation novel which has been current from George Eliot to Margaret Drabble. The most effective state-of-the-nation commentary in art seems to be indirect and spontaneous, born of some local controversy, like Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, or even War and Peace, which was a kind of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in ...”

“... quarto, with the additional teasing possibility of its having been co-written with the unsavoury George Wilkins (suspected brothel-keeper, convicted perpetrator of various acts of violence against women, and playwright). Lytton Strachey, it’s true, wasn’t keen. In ‘Shakespeare’s Final Period’ (published in Books and Characters, 1922) he wrote that ...”

“... with respect to their ‘concreteness, precision, subtlety’. A footnote to an Arden edition of Macbeth that Leavis had already deplored in print was set for discussion in the exam paper. The teacher who was versed in Leavis’s writing would have known how to prime his pupils. It was a reciprocal arrangement. Nearly all of his students ‘had deliberately ...”

“... scholarship boy at Leeds Grammar School, Harrison was duly given the part of the Drunken Porter in Macbeth. The snub not only politicised him (‘So right, yer buggers, then! We’ll occupy/your lousy leasehold Poetry’), it gave him a lifelong theme: the clash between ‘high’ and ‘low’. Whether used to denote a social divide or a cultural one, it’s ...”

“... even if they did not encourage him in his deviant designs. Among his colleagues at the BBC were George Orwell and Louis MacNeice, both of whom he greatly admired; and there were others, their names by now probably forgotten, who brought conviction and real knowledge to Empson’s side of the fight. One such, Ralf Bonwit, a formidable, dedicated Japanese ...”

“... been accepted as an improvement on ‘poetry’. Apart from garbled rumours about an all-black Macbeth in Harlem, and a documentary version of Wells’s War of the Worlds which panicked the US Eastern seaboard, this film was all we knew of him, and it hit us out of the blue. But even then, I recall my friends and I detecting a whiff of the brilliant ...”

“... personalised stamp: ‘take forth paper, fold it, write upon’t, read it, afterwards seal it’ (Macbeth V.i). It is handsome, expensive and chunky – Wheler gives its weight as ‘12 dwt’ (i.e. 12 pennyweights), which is equivalent to about two thirds of an ounce. One may call it a relic without intending any saintly or cultish overtone. It is just ...”

“... remedy for numerous afflictions. The drug was sometimes associated with the dark arts, as it is in Macbeth, where ‘Witch’s mummy’ is among the ingredients of a concoction so powerful that it can raise Banquo from his grave; but its advocates included some of the most distinguished physicians and scientists of the 16th and 17th centuries – prominent ...”

“... on collaborations which did not have enough Shakespeare in the mix. Pericles, a collaboration with George Wilkins, was also left out, though later included in the more capacious Third Folio of 1663-64. The early references to Cardenio are bodiless – a title without a text – but it is possible that one fragment of the Jacobean Cardenio survives ...”