William Shakespeare

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'...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

MD centred her story on a woman whose life is drifting, who has plenty of leisure but no direction. The idea came to her when she herself was bustling around London on her short visits...

This book makes some pretence of being an early text, though the way that Nicholas Moldwarp is named and introduced suggests the superior eye of posterity. Manning once again imitates not only early spelling, but...

The action, which takes place in a magic forest, fantastically enables second chances which nevertheless fail to be better exploited than the first choices were. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls this the most...

Writer Liz Lochhead comments that these tough, transparent fables of longing, of difficult delight and consolation, are romances in the Shakespearian sense.Judith Thurman calls this volume the most Danish of ID 's works...

This text is divided into short, discrete paragraphs which seem often unconnected with each other. The first one reads Oh, my lost ones. The protagonist and speaker has some difficulty placing herself in time...

Hatchways is one of ES 's more humorous novels, since much is made of a foreign visitor's response to English culture and his desire to know more about what he takes to be its representatives....

There are occasional moments of wit, as when destitution reveals that the family servants think terms of practical life rather than sentimental fiction: the old-fashioned type of servant, who appears so frequently in Morton 's...