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“... as anxious to avoid civil wars over succession). But John of Salisbury, Gervase of Canterbury and William of Newburgh all say that the initiative was with Eleanor. Gervase claims that she used consanguinity as a ‘pretext’ and William that she ‘grew most irritated with the king’s habits and … said that she had ...”

“... post-feudal Indian middle class and members of the British scholarly and administrative classes. William Jones, whose researches at the Fort William College in Calcutta were largely responsible for inaugurating Orientalist scholarship and the reconstruction of Indian history, wore native clothes made of muslin in the heat ...”

“... on committees; it could hardly be mistaken for a creature of the same name defended long ago by William Blake. Dame Helen herself seems often to speak on behalf of some public body. And sure enough she speaks up for Lord Robbins and her other colleagues, for the most part robustly impenitent though prepared to concede ‘a disturbing development, which we ...”

“... There, sweepings do as well As the best-ordered meal.By the time Jonson wrote these lines, Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre – or, as almost everyone now agrees, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, co-written by Shakespeare and the nastiest man in Jacobean theatre, George Wilkins (a pimp charged in 1611 with kicking a ...”

“... and John Lavagnino’s monumental collection is ‘based on the award-winning design of the Oxford Shakespeare’, the binding and dust jacket defiantly proclaim its difference from that distinguished model. The Shakespeare was bound in the press’s traditional Oxford blue, its spine adorned with the familiar gilt coat of ...”

“... make it their own, and use it to create something new.Jonathan Bate’s​ How the Classics Made Shakespeare has more modest goals. Bate grants that Shakespeare’s classical influences have often been studied before, but claims that ‘certain aspects of Shakespeare’s classical ...”

“... out the poets.’ She exaggerated, of course, but a book of that title which omitted Chaucer and Shakespeare, Spenser and all the Elizabethans, Donne and nearly all the Jacobeans, while including a host of nonentities, such as Pomfret, Stepney, Dyer, Smith, Duke and King, was at the very least defective and misleading. The fault was not Dr Johnson’s. The ...”

“... One Saturday morning as I lay in bed, dying of flu, William Empson burst into my room, very sprightly, saying: ‘Now come along Jones, you must get up and come to Stonehenge.’ I croaked an apology and claimed an imminent, prior appointment with the Lord God Almighty. ‘Oh dear. I am sorry,’ he said. ‘But you would do much better to come to Stonehenge ...”

“... In Cakes and Ale (1930), William Somerset Maugham has Willie Ashenden – his narrator and stand-in – explain that, in reputation-building terms, ‘longevity is genius.’ He comes out with this idea while discussing the case of his friend Edward Driffield, a Hardy-like figure who becomes the Grand Old Man of English Letters after seeing off late Victorian accusations of impropriety ...”

“... a member of the Church of England who supported the High Church reforms carried out by William Laud, the archbishop of Canterbury. This leaves us with the question: when did Milton become Milton? Nicholas McDowell’s new study, Poet of Revolution, tries to account for Milton’s transformation from ‘obscure student poet in the early ...”

“... conceptions of the great roles. So he began by quoting a weighty commonplace from another critic, William Archer, twenty years Agate’s senior. ‘We have each our private ideal of Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Lear,’ said Archer. ‘Every actor who undertakes them has to pass through a triple ordeal, encountering, first our imagination, kindled by ...”

“... woman of letters would like to find and befriend a Thomas Warton. The great 18th-century editor of Shakespeare, Edmond Malone, certainly recognised his usefulness. Malone, single-minded in his pursuit of standards of textual scholarship that would trump preceding editors of Shakespeare, knew that his friendship with Warton ...”

“... seruants place and dutie’ was acknowledged to be ‘of more abiect and inferiour kinde’, as William Gouge put it in Of Domesticall Duties (1622). By the mid-20th century, the material conditions of service had changed beyond recognition, yet the ideological assumptions that had governed the early modern household continued to colour the language and ...”

“... in an academic career, mainly through the (contested) attribution of a late poem of (maybe) Shakespeare’s; as a media star, wheeled out to comment on anonymous, or would-be anonymous, texts of all sorts; and as an expert witness in law cases. By the end of the book he is complaining about his e-mail: ‘in one recent year, thirteen thousand messages ...”

“... In the spring or summer of 1599, the Chorus of Henry V, in Shakespeare’s only explicit reference to a contemporary politician, looked forward to the return of the 33-year-old Earl of Essex from his campaign in Ireland, ‘bringing rebellion broached on his sword’ – a light touch from which some heavy inferences have been drawn ...”