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“... and witty aphorisms. On the first page of At Last, Patrick is buttonholed in the crematorium by Nicholas Pratt, an awful friend of his father’s, who says, ‘Surprised to see me?’ and produces a page-long monologue, which begins: ‘I’ve become rather a memorial-creeper. One’s bound to at my age. It’s no use sitting at home guffawing over the ...”

“... multi-volume histories of Rome, Britain, France and other Empires, as well as Euripides and Shakespeare, long passages of which he could quote from memory. A man of action who loved the limelight, he could also be notably discreet, so that his international network of friends made possible a series of diplomatic triumphs that left barely any paper ...”

“... 1983) to the painter Barrie Cooke, where he describes fishing on Lake Victoria with his son, Nicholas:Nick & I went across one night – a biggish sea, a very big load of fish, sailing into the most incredible display of lightning I ever saw. Truly like a thunderstorm on an electrified planet in a space fiction film. We got into a race with another ...”

“... from some perception which makes intolerable to him his probably emblematic task of copying. Nicholas Salaman’s heroine Charlet, ‘falling apart’ in his new novel, has more to do with up-to-the-minute advertising copy than with 19th-century legal scrivening, and is neither a survivor like Wemmick, nor a martyr like Bartleby, but a victim without ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... without content. The historical shift is very similar to what happened with the character of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who in the 19th-century alienist literature appears as a wayward public schoolboy whose madness, contra Shakespeare, is real even as he disowns it and plays with it. The additional, and Jewish, view is ...”

“... are ours, or, more precisely, they lie at the roots of our European conditions. Neither Homer nor Shakespeare has very much to say of the illusions or potentialities which now engage European self-consciousness. Virgil and Dante are talismanic and exemplary of just that consciousness and of its singular contamination of Classical and modern, of pagan and ...”

“... surprise, excitement, mystery and catharsis. E.M. Forster was wrong to deprecate the ‘story’. Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoevsky had no such misgivings. Does this mean ceasing to discriminate between literature and yarns? Professor James Naremore, in Professor Bernard Benstock’s symposium, seems to imply that it does. Dashiell Hammett, he ...”

“... all the countries he visited, he saw only what he had put there in advance.’ More recently Nicholas Jenkins put it neatly: Roussel, he wrote, appears ‘to have had no impressions of Africa’.* Born in 1877 on the boulevard Malesherbes, a few doors down from the Prousts, Roussel grew up in obscene luxury (the family home contained both the era’s ...”

“... captain of horse. Powell says in his introduction that ‘increasingly, throughout the Notebook, Shakespeare became my companion, his point of view ever more congenial.’ This sounds pretty grand, even Widmerpoolish, and it’s a pleasure to report that what Powell gets out of Shakespeare, on the evidence of the ...”

“... was certain that fame (also in French la gloire) would be his: ‘I was the equal of Dante and of Shakespeare, I was feeling what Victor Hugo had felt when he was 70, what Napoleon had felt in 1811 and what Tannhäuser had felt while musing on Venusberg.’ These recollections were confided to Pierre Janet, the psychiatrist who wrote up Roussel’s case in ...”

“... literary enthusiasms – she loved Strindberg and Baudelaire and her favourite character was Shakespeare’s Coriolanus – was like a lover with several rivals. Jealousy was an early and lasting obsession. With her half-reluctant connivance he learned to dispose ruthlessly of his mother’s admirers, and later came to feel that his childish and ...”

“... rings round a slow-footed administration and sending up its methods of textual interrogation. Shakespeare was admonished in the Craftsman for his shameless attacks on the Hanoverian monarchy in the history plays (‘Shakespeare hath put several Speeches in her Mouth, which are capable of very bad ...”

“... his true nature’; and Houseman added a pertinent detail for the most commanding and repellent of Shakespeare’s heroes: ‘His physical presence was magnificent – six foot four with a heavyweight boxer’s body and a head that … had all the required look of nobility and dark power.’ The performance, Brooks Atkinson wrote in a perceptive review, showed ...”

“... suggest that Spark is a very talented, often enchanting ‘diversionist’, as one character calls Nicholas Farringdon in The Girls of Slender Means, is nowadays to risk excoriation from the boosters of contemporary fiction, whose literary horizon seems to be the rim of a book-party cocktail glass. A consensus has closed like an eyelid. For years now Muriel ...”