William Shakespeare

The selection ranges from Shakespeare to Angus Wilson , from the Bible to Liz Lochhead .

Severo, brother of the heroine, Lellia, has a pathological distrust of women which is rather lamely explained by his having loved a faithless, wicked woman who then drowned herself. Despite his excesses, Lellia succeeds in...

An odd couple on holiday from England (Stanley Williams, his Jamaican immigrant parents' my-son-the-banker, and Jessie O'Donnell, a singer, a foundling raised by nuns in Leeds) drive haphazardly across Europe towards the Middle East...

In an amusing fantasy entitled Trial of Jane Austen the accused stands charged with masquerading as a great writer. Pompous or foolish witnesses accuse her of ignoring national politics, social problems, sex, professional careerism...

An Advertisement claims that The Recess is a version, in modernised English, of a manuscript memoir from the reign of Elizabeth I . It breaks new ground for the English novel in various ways: it...

The book's contents consisted largely of already published journalism, carefully revised for the collection. Woolf had put detailed consideration into the idea of making a structure for the book, but she ended by rejecting...

CT 's dedication sets out her own literary and dramatic models: Shakespeare , Dryden , Otway , and Nathaniel Lee . The play, set in late fifteenth-century France, concerns royal marriage. Charles VIII

This was not the first dictionary of English, but its predecessors had remained more or less close to the model of a word-list, omitting common words or any attempt to distinguish one idiomatic usage from...

These pieces convey vividly personal memories of people, places, and events from her childhood, and the impact her famous writer father had on her early life. She writes: my memory is a sort of Witches'...

Her range of literary reference and comment is wide: as well as Richardson (whose Clarissa she unequivocally praises), it encompasses Blair , Sterne and Smollett as travel-writers, and Homer . Grant charges Samuel Johnson

The play is a Senecan tragedy, written for the closet, not the public stage, though it is worth remembering that upper-class circles reading or performing such plays were connoisseurs of the highly dramatised masque...

This novel is set during the opening production at The Dolphin, a recently derelict and now lovingly restored Victorian theatre beside the Thames in London. The central character, Peregrine or Perry Jay, is a...

Whereas the ballad-opera (based on Shakespeare 's The Taming of the Shrew) was misogynist, as its title suggests, LP 's prologue was vehemently pro-woman.

Attached to Septimus is a different cluster of characters that includes his anxious young Italian wife and his doctors, the bluff Dr Holmes, who tells him to pull himself together, and the dogmatic and unfeeling...

The plot of this novel is a version of a romance archetype: poor but deserving girl confounds all expectations by marrying up. Elizabeth Bennet is the quintessence of the witty and resourceful heroine who had...