William Shakespeare

She concentrates on the visits of her subjects to England in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. To all of them—Mallarmé (a poet she deeply loved), Verlaine (whose list of books probably read...

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.

She insists on admiring the presumed simplicity of manners in the Homeric age in preference to modern, civilized, sophisticated society. Her key image for Homer's style—of wild, luxuriant, varied growth, the opposite of a...

This is unusual: a compliment from a Frenchman to Montagu, whose Shakespeare criticism was anti-Voltaire and therefore anti-French.

The title-page quotes Shakespeare on the topic of change, which becomes a central theme of the book. A facsimile reprint with scholarly apparatus appeared in the Chawton House Library Series: Women's Travel Writings, 207-8.

The arborist re-reads Oliver Twist alongside their partner's lectures and urges the partner to consider discussing the musical form of the novel (a request accommodated, as the academic threads it in alongside Auld Lang Syne...

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

For this production she made some cuts, and revised the catastrophe or plot-resolution. She later said this was the only one of her plays that she would dignify by the name of tragedy.

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...

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'...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...