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“... premises in Stratford during or soon after the town’s first great Shakespearean festival, David Garrick’s Jubilee of 1769; it may even have adorned the Birthplace itself, part of which was still in business as the Swan and Maidenhead Inn. Garrick himself preferred to think of the infant Shakespeare being taught by Nature rather than Fancy: but the ...”

“... that’s been nearly universally praised. Before it was even published, the New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, called it ‘extraordinary’; the New York Times critic A.O. Scott said it was ‘essential, like water or air’; in a widely circulated blurb, Toni Morrison likened Coates to Baldwin and declared the book ‘required reading’; even Jay-Z ...”

“... by the selector-cataloguers of his panoramic exhibition at the Tate, Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, as ‘for later generations the very epitome of Romantic landscape painting’. It was the most derelict, most desolate scene Constable ever pictured, with its ruined pair of towers set beside an endless flat expanse of land and sea and land, and, with ...”

“... are necessary, and creative, and very much a part of Lawrence’s own creativity. As Raymond Williams pointed out, his achievement in Sons and Lovers – ‘writing with the experience; with the mother as well as the son; with the life they belong to’ – is a validation, rather than merely a description, of community. In Sons and Lovers, in The ...”

“... insight into the nature of being American than any book I know apart from William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain. A special sort of American, of course. Nothing to do with the traditions of the Eastern seaboard or the Deep South. Born in Illinois, but into an Air Force family, Shepard has been travelling from the start. He was brought up ...”

“... For Brown, the clearest statement of good fetishism’s purpose and method is William Carlos Williams’s brisk ultimatum: ‘No ideas but in things.’ This does not mean that there should be no ideas at all, Brown explains. It means rather that ‘the poet should recognise things as the necessary condition for ideas.’ Literature can often be about ...”

“... are lyrics everyone knows, but not ones Sondheim can hear without squirming. He went to Williams College in Massachusetts and acted a little: the part he craved was the young killer in Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall. He had to smoke for that role, and continued for decades. After graduating in 1950, he studied ...”

“... A drunken American historian once lurched over to David Caute at a party and told him: ‘Having read your last novel, or part of it, I’d advise you to give up writing fiction – if you weren’t such a lousy historian.’ Caute, a connoisseur of masochism, tells the story against himself (in Contemporary Novelists, 1976 ...”

“... the hobnailed boot can be wielded with just as much delicacy and skill as the épée, once said of David Owen that the Good Fairy who attended his birth had generously bestowed upon him the three qualities of charm, intelligence and good looks. He is then reported to have added: ‘What a pity that the Bad Fairy made him a shit.’ This is a pretty cruel thing ...”

“... Cup Final ...’ ‘When we had Huw Wheldon at the BBC ...’ ‘When we were first married ...’ David Hare calls the curators of these arcadias the ‘whenwes’. They guard their territory with a dogged devotion. Although the theatre is a medium that exists entirely in the present tense, it is not immune to the arcadian virus: ‘the National Theatre at ...”

“... leader. Would he – could he? – perform the countless vital tasks that come naturally to David Cameron or Tony Blair: everything from how to comport yourself at the despatch box to the best way to climb out of a chauffeur-driven car, from how to use an autocue to knowing which pop band to choose on Desert Island Discs. If you don’t know which tie ...”

“... He was capable of spontaneous acts of generosity, such as the unstinting support he offered Denis Williams, a 26-year-old Guyanese painter, in 1949-50. ‘Rarely,’ O’Keeffe observes, ‘did Lewis act in anybody’s exclusive interest but his own.’ In this case, he did. He wrote admiringly about Williams’s work, and ...”

“... is always tempered by technical skill and a beautiful intelligence. After Walcott’s orchestra, David Holbrook strikes one as deliberately low-keyed, muted both in his choice of subject and his manner of handling it. Although his Selected Poems span twenty years, there is remarkably little change or development. The themes remain constant: his ...”

“... Park Honan has done one of the two already, and now has done the other. Coming shortly after David Riggs’s solid, even too-solid The World of Christopher Marlowe, his Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy feels a little lightweight. He is probably right to say that he has a better story about Marlowe’s origins in Canterbury and his doings at Corpus in ...”

“... Just under forty years ago David Erdman provided for William Blake historical contexts in abundance in Blake: Prophet against Empire (1954). It was a remarkable work of literary detection, which still dominates the field. Some Blake readers have felt that his attribution of correspondence between text and contemporaneous events was over-literal (as well as hazardous), and Jon Mee is one of these ...”