Cambridge University Press

Shakespeare’s great contemporary Ben Jonson dressed an actor in armour to open his play Poetaster. The Prologue explained:

If any muse why I salute the stage,
An armèd Prologue, know, ’tis a
dangerous age,
Wherein who writes had need present
his scenes
Forty-fold proof against the conjuring
means
Of base detractors and illiterate apes,
That fill up rooms in fair and formal
shapes.

Wilhelm II, German Kaiser and King of Prussia, may be a shadowy figure for Australian readers, better known as the butt of funny-scary caricatures in British World War I propaganda or of black humour in popular soldiers’ songs, than as a political player in his own right. He remains enigmatic even for scholars. Some hand him the burden of responsibility for World War I, despite the immediate trigger being the military standoff between two other states altogether, Austro-Hungary and Serbia. Others see him as an incompetent figurehead who merely rubberstamped the territorial ambitions of the German military.

It was not until the middle years of the nineteenth century, so far as we can tell, that anyone seriously doubted that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon called William Shakespeare had written the plays that for the past two and a half centuries had passed without question under his name. In the early 1850s, however, a private scholar from Connecticut named Delia Bacon began to develop an alternative view. She believed that the plays had been composed not by Shakespeare but by a syndicate of writers headed probably by Francis Bacon, whom she later came to think of as her distant ancestor.

‘If in this I have been tedious,’ admitted William Cowper in a letter published in 1750, ‘it may be some excuse, I had not time to make it shorter.’ In The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c.1860–1920, Martyn Lyons has accomplished what Cowper could not. This is a short book but withal it successfully tackles an expansive agenda. It is in no way tedious. Indeed, it is an excellent book – ambitious and thought-provoking – and deserving of an equally large audience within the academy and beyond it.

Nothing ever gets taken out of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) – at least, that’s what I believed until I read this book. Words which are no longer used simply stay where they are, complete with their quotations, and the addition of a small dagger symbol (†) to signify their obsolescence: for example, †devouress (defined in 1895 as ‘a female devourer’), whose earliest known use was in John Wycliffe’s 1382 translation of the Bible, and whose most recent known use was in a 1611 dictionary of the Italian and English tongues. So it was shocking to discover that OED editor Robert Burchfield removed a considerable number of words from the four supplementary volumes of the dictionary, the first of which appeared in 1972.

The scene: a cold, bright January day in the snow-covered capital of the United States. The occasion: the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy. Up to the podium steps America’s unofficial poet laureate, eighty-six-year-old Robert Frost. Temporarily blinded by the glare of brilliant sunshine and freshly fallen snow, Frost sets aside the handwritten text of his specially prepared ‘Dedication’ and recites from memory a much earlier poem, ‘The Gift Outright’.

Wikipedia lists fifty-three books that are currently available on the subject of climate change, and this new book will make fifty-four. Such books fall into one of two groups: they either support the orthodoxy or dissent from it. Tony Eggleton’s book is one that supports it. It is well written, clear in its argument, quite even-handed, and comprehensive. I enjoyed reading it, even though I have my criticisms. Why do I criticise? Because I am a dissenter.

This is an impressive publication, a massive tome with high gloss pages, beautifully designed with the highest production values, lavishly illustrated, with entries provided (on my count) by 229 separate contributors. This monumental collective effort makes a defining contribution to the study and documentation of architecture in this country, and to Australian architectural history. It is astonishing in its breadth, and gives us for the first time as near to a complete understanding of the trajectory of architectural ideas and practice in this country as is possible. Put simply, we have never before had so much information instantly available in a condensed form.

Violent and non-violent harm is endured, inflicted, and internalised by all people at different times, and to varying degrees. It was Cicero who is believed to have first posited that the main obligation human beings have is to refrain from harming one another, and that any unnecessary act of doing so renders that person an enemy of the human race.

In a 2009 interview linked to his production of Endgame in which he played Clov, the actor–director Simon McBurney observed that ‘nearly all theatre colleagues I meet have a Beckett story’. My own (second-hand) favourite Beckett story, told me by the Brecht scholar and former deputy editor of the Times Literary Supplement John Willett, might seem too drolly apposite to be true: but he assured me that it was.