In this lively comedy of love and money in sixteenth-century Venice, Bassanio wants to impress the wealthy heiress Portia but lacks the necessary funds. He turns to his merchant friend, Antonio, who is forced to borrow from Shylock, a Jewish moneylen...

Mieke Bal has had a significant impact on every field she has touched, from Old Testament scholarship and narratology to critical methods and visual culture. This brilliant and controversial intellectual invariably performs a high-wire act at the poi...

"Murano", a recent work by the distinguished American poet Mark Doty, is a contemplative meditation on human mortality and the mystery of artistic creation. Addressed to his late friend, the poet Lynda Hull, the musings in "Murano" are set against th...

"Marabou", Jane Yeh's first book of poems, is a meditation on the nature of artifice, and on the self. Her snapshots freeze fraught instants in the lives of a broad cast of characters: the horror movie mummy, an Elizabethan shoemaker, a flock of Cumb...

In "Merchant Prince" Thomas McCarthy presents two groups of poems, set largely in Cork, and a novella set in Italy, in the period from 1769 and 1831. They tell the story of Nathaniel Murphy: his training for the priesthood, the loss of his virginity...

This is a story of life in the age of Mandelson: politician, aesthete, director of communication. Is it possible to be happy in the age of Mandelson? Moderniser, trouble-shooter, king-maker, architect of New Labour, power-broker, agent, asset, conf...

From the hilarious mischief of the elf Puck to the rough humor of the self-centered Bottom and his fellow players, from the palace of Theseus in Athens to the magic wood where fairies play, Shakespeare's marvelous A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play...

Perhaps no other Shakespearean drama so engulfs its readers in the ruinous journey of surrender to evil as does Macbeth. A timeless tragedy about the nature of ambition, conscience, and the human heart, the play holds a profound grip on the Western i...

The title sequence of "Making the Beds for the Dead" charts the journey of a virus in "the plague year". Come from outer space, it travels – on a fox's paw, the beak of a kite and a crow and a buzzard – into the very heart of our lives. The poet incl...

Donald Davie mapped some of the most dependable critical routes into the heart Modernism – American, English, Irish and Continental. This book includes his most important essays on the subject, starting with his exemplary definition of "Modernism in...