Daniel Swift

Gerald Murnane’s Landscape with Landscape opens with a splendidly disgruntled preface. The book is a collection of six longish stories and was originally published in 1985, when it was panned by a reviewer. ‘Some writers may claim not to be affected by reviews or even not to read them,’ he observes in his preface: ‘I

Here is the opening of a sonnet written by Wilfred Owen in the spring of 1911: ‘Three colours have I known the Deep to wear;/ ’Tis well today that Purple grandeurs gloom.’ Owen was 18 and had just been on a pilgrimage to Teignmouth in Devon, where his hero John Keats had once stayed. The

Perhaps it was all because of his name. John Donne: for a poet this must have felt a little like destiny, and even in the most unlikely of moments he couldn’t resist making puns. He sat down to write a letter to the enraged father of the teenage girl he had just married in secret.

Shakespeare’s first biographer was the gossipy antiquarian John Aubrey, who famously described the playwright as ‘not a company keeper’. It has long been tempting to see him this way: Shakespeare the aloof genius, almost divine. There’s something chilly in this vision, and scholarly work on Shakespeare of the past few decades has increasingly tended to

When Romeo and Juliet first meet at a party, their words to one another fall into the form of a sonnet: an exchange of 14 lines, expressing mutual love and ending with a neat rhyming couplet and a kiss. It is a touching, haunting moment, and like so much in Shakespeare, it also has an

Keith Douglas is perhaps the best-known overlooked poet. He died following the D-Day landings in 1944, and his Collected Poems were published in 1951, followed by a Selected Poems in 1964. ‘Now, 20 years after his death,’ wrote Ted Hughes in his slightly puffy introduction to that volume, ‘it is becoming clear that he offers

The deployment of Shakespeare to describe Brexit is by now a cliché. It might take the form of a quotation, be borrowed in a headline, or involve the name of one of the better-known characters; it might turn up in that most hollow of adjectives, Shakespearean. It has two possible modes. There is triumphalism drawn

Gerald Murnane is the kind of writer literary critics adore. His novels have little in the way of plot or even character, and it is hard to tell the narrator from the writer, so that all his stories might be essays; his sentences are weirdly flat but interrupted occasionally by wild visions. Try this, for

Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece is a puzzling and often terrible poem. Lucrece, the devout wife of Collatine, is raped by Tarquin, the son of the king of Rome. Her suffering inspires a revolution led by Brutus, and this is the beginning of the first Roman republic. It’s a rich myth of sex and politics, and

‘What country, friends, is this?’ asks Viola at the start of Twelfth Night. She is shipwrecked and heartbroken; she does not know where she is, nor does she really care. Shakespeare is fascinated by strange places, and by how familiar places may become strange; how the world looks different if we look at it from

On War and Writing by Samuel Hynes is hardly about war at all. There is little about combat here, or the actual business of fighting and killing — what Shakespeare wryly called ‘the fire-eyed maid of smoky war/ All hot and bleeding’. Hynes is an august scholar of English literature and particularly the literature of

John Burnside is the author of an impressive bookshelf of elegant novels and slim, precise volumes of poetry, and like all prolific writers he has certain repeated themes. Nicely, repetition is one of his themes. He writes of the tricks of memory, and the impossibility of perfectly recalling the past. He writes of absent fathers,

In backgammon, a blot is a single checker, sitting alone and unprotected. This is a sly title for this sly novel (which was published in the US as the more literal A Gambler’s Anatomy). The hero, Alexander Bruno, is a single, exposed man, and a professional backgammon player. He also suffers from an eye condition:

In an autobiographical note written late in his life, Jonathan Swift set down an astonishing anecdote from his childhood. When he was a baby in Dublin, he was put into the care of an English wet nurse, and one day she heard that one of her relatives back in England was close to death. Hoping

Ian McEwan’s novels are drawn to enclosed spaces. There is the squash court upon which the surgeon plays a meticulously described game in Saturday, and the honeymoon suite in a little seaside hotel for the awkward newlyweds in On Chesil Beach. In Atonement, the mother is kept in her bedroom by migraines while her daughter

[audioplayer src=”http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/260046943-the-spectator-podcast-obamas-eu-intervention-the-pms.mp3″ title=”Lloyd Evans and Dr Daniel Swift discuss how Shakespeare died” startat=1008] Listen [/audioplayer]Who’s there? Shakespeare’s most famous play opens with this slightly hokey line, and the question remains for his countless audiences, biographers and scholars. Who was this man? What makes his works so apparently endless? Like the plays, his life is studded