Some have argued that Auden was a victim of his own naivety regarding the prospect of impending war. A few days before its declaration and while on a Greyhound bus at the end of that 1939 “honeymoon” with Kallman, he had written home to England: “There is a radio on this coach, so that every hour or so, one has a violent pain in one’s stomach as the news comes on. By the time you get this, I suppose, we shall know one way or the other.”

T.S. Eliot was uncomfortable with Hamlet, notably describing the play in 1919 as being not only “puzz­ling and disquieting as is none of the others” but also “dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible because it is in excess of the facts as they appear”.

In his own lifetime, Shakespeare had been considered just one of a bevy of capable and successful wordsmiths. How was it then that, in the eighteenth century, the flow of tourist traffic to Stratford reached such annoying volumes that a fed-up local vicar felled 'the Shakespeare tree' in a bid to get some peace and quiet?

Upon the death of her father in 1904, a despairing Virginia threw herself from a window too low to do any real harm. Recovering, she insisted Edward VII was lurking and cursing in the shrubbery while birds spoke to her in Greek. Just 22 at the time, madness and maladies would be frequent companions until her suicide in1942

"I sit in my room in the headquarters of the noise of the whole apartment ... My father bursts through the door to my room and passes through, his robe trailing ... the ashes are being scraped out of the stove in the next room … there is shouting one word after the other through the foyer. Father is gone; now the subtler, more diffuse, more hopeless noise begins, led by the voices of two canaries"

After the Holocaust it became impossible to produce the play with Shylock as audiences for centuries had known him. As literary critic John Gross noted, he need not have been a Jew, but he is a Jew for a reason -- a hate figure to be mocked and reviled for our amusement

A chance find in a bush op shop proved not only a bargain but an irresistible invitation to ponder the life and achievements of the scientific genius who gave our planet's regular visitor its name. In some ways that is a pity, as the comet is where, for most of us moderns, knowledge of the astronomer and polymath begins and ends. There was much to the man than that

Austen’s view of herself as a writer -- the miniaturist with 'the little bit ... of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush” -- should not be mistaken for the self-deprecation of a shrinking violet. On the contrary, it was a confident and honest self-appraisal by a mature novelist who had committed herself determinedly to write only about what she had personally observed or heard

There is much to be had in Che's Last Embrace despite being a relatively slim volume. A page-turner and rollicking read, Nicholas Hasluck also offers us a paradigm for the nonsense that can pass for intellectual thinking in current Australian culture. Overall, as many critics have previously observed, this is a further demonstration of his perspicacity as a writer