William Shakespeare

The 1986 deregulation of the stock market—the Big Bang—by fortunate coincidence took place during the play's workshop and development period. The play centres on a corporate takeover, which functions allegorically: a corporate raider...

For readers familiar with the Shakespeare comedy (as Jemima certainly is), parallels are discernible between the personages and situations on stage and those of the actual world—parallels which are unsettling rather than helpful for Jemima...

Its setting is Catford Street, an ordinary, poor street in shabby postwar London, and the elegant Square round the corner. Its protagonist is a child waif, Lovejoy Mason; RG 's theme is the childhood...

She also says that it can be read as the mirror-image of her earliest novelistic theme: the child's relation to the mother. Duffy dedicates the book to St Venus (a saint whose festival is...

Sister Invention is a new name for or new concept of that creative power that has sometimes been called the Muse, which recalls the way St Francis would address non-human beings as brothers. JK writes...

The title-page quotes Shakespeare 's Macbeth. A vivid, to-the-moment opening introduces a tale of revenge and restored inheritance. Add another fagot [sic] to the fire, and replenish the flask, said the aged Martin to...

The first half of the story is set in an imaginary western Irish village called Cloonoila, a strange but utterly convincing hybrid of the idyllic and the stultifyingly parochial. The second half is set in...

DPC was one of those claiming serious status for the novel by literary allusion. She uses Horace on her title-page, Pope to head the whole novel, and for chapter-headings Chaucer , Shakespeare , Goldsmith ...

Brave New World (titled from the words of Shakespeare 's Miranda on her first sight of human social community) is in some ways remarkably prescient, in its forecast of extra-uterine pregnancy and a universal drug...

Critic Amanda Burgess sees this as perhaps the earliest example of the Irish national tale, and of a shift in RMR 's literary focus from England to Ireland which coincided with her own move in...

Jemima here makes her first attempt to be a detective as a fifteen-year-old convent schoolgirl. While many of these pieces, like the sardonically titled Have a Nice Death, are indeed murder stories, On the...

Characteristics of Women is the first thorough treatment of Shakespeare 's oeuvre from a woman-centred perspective, notwithstanding its opening assertion that women in general are intellectually inferior to men. As critic Christy Desmet observes,...

In this version of her life-story, ESG traces her fall back to her mother's refusal to allow her to marry her first love. She accords this refusal a passage of purple prose beginning Ah! wherefore...

The theoretical essay with which FPC headed Josephine Butler 's landmark collection Woman's Work and Woman's Culture, 1869, launches out with wit: Of all the theories current concerning women, none is more curious than...

While the present-day plot produces a series of surreal confrontations, it is punctuated by a string of glimpses into the past. These begin when Swanscombe Man (the prehistoric human whose bones are the earliest evidence...