In this volume, we spend a week driving around Wales and the Marches with an eminent and sociable linguist who has plenty of fine and amusing stories with which to amuse the dull spaces between towns. He knows why each city and village is named as it is, and he knows what interesting thing happened there in 642 or in 1739. Once in a while, we stop to do some work — to give a talk at a conference, to attend a festival of used books or Welsh music, to record sample accents for a BBC documentary. We learn why, in the British navy, one should never speak the word “232” aloud. We learn why Charles Darwin’s famous grandfather didn’t get along with Dictionary Johnson. We learn exactly what the differences are between Harry Potter’s British and American editions. We learn that Austrian bees can understand the dance of British bees, but that they dance with slightly different accents that lead to mild misunderstandings. It’s a pleasant, unsystematic interlude, a working week away from work.

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

Notice that ambiguous but quietly uncompromising disjunction. Have nothing that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. Does Morris mean that we can retain ugly but useful things? Surely not! And note, too, the subtle acknowledgment that we can know something is useful (by using it) but we can only believe in its beauty.

This pleasant and concise biography of William Morris focuses most strongly on his literary work, but not to the exclusion of his contributions to interior design, printing, stained glass, and politics. Morris seems never to have hesitated to study something he wanted to know, or to pursue expertise he felt he might enjoy or that might benefit his friends and countrymen.

Everyone was talking about veal stock this week. I spend the weekend roasting bones and simmering at a lazy bubble and skimming, skimming, until it was so good it hurts. And so I found myself rereading the opening chapter, and one thing led to another.

A tasty pendant to Paradise Lost.

Blake was right: in Paradise Lost, Satan and his crew are by far the most interesting and, for the most part, admirable characters. They are in a bad place. Literally. They address themselves with commendable directness to their problems. Shall they continue the war, which they now know to be hopeless? Shall they reconcile themselves to accept eternal punishment? Shall they attempt to remodel Hell to make it less unpleasant, or to change themselves to better fit their circumstances? Shall they use their wits to conquer a new world?

Adam's a problem, and Eve is worse; much of Paradise Lost seeks to justify woman's subjugation to man. Much of the language is wonderful, even to the most casual reader:

Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon:
The world was all before them where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They, hand in hand, with wand'ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Milton is more fun than his reputation would suggest, and this lovely edition is nicely printed, nicely bound, yet not unreasonably expensive.

We know almost nothing about Shakespeare's biography, but we do have one record of something he actually said, not wrote.

On Monday 11 May 1612, William Shakespeare have evidence in a lawsuit at the Court of Requests in Westminster.

This deposition involves a dispute over an unpaid dowry; back in 1604, when he was lodging in Silver Street with in the Montjoy household, Christopher Montjoy has asked Shakespeare to convince Montjoy's former apprentice to marry Montjoy's daughter and to officiate at the betrothal. Shakespeare obliged. The family has now fallen out, the son-in-law is suing for his dowry, and Shakespeare testifies that some dowry was agreed but can't remember the exact amount.

From this small shred, Nichols pursues a fascinating, rigorous, and readable pursuit of Shakespeare's London environment. The house on Silver Street is gone, burnt in The Great Fire. Silver Street itself is gone, erased in postwar development. We can know that Shakespeare's room was upstairs, as was the privy. We can know he had a window. And though we have no idea which way his window faced, Nichols reconstructs that he might have looked out on the busy shopping street, or perhaps into a neighboring apothecary garden. And he finds out what they grew in that garden, and why.

Nichols' tireless search through record rolls, tax ledgers, physician’s case books, property archives, and the entire body of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, yields remarkable detail. When the newly-married couple moved out of the house, they moved in with George Wilkins, a nearby victualler who longed to be a poet, who was indeed writing a play (Pericles) with Shakespeare, and who — Nichols pieces together the evidence very neatly — seems to have at the same time been launching a career as a pimp.

Nichols is careful not to dash beyond the evidence, but his point is wonderful. As Shakespeare was writing Lear, we know — we have contemporary testimony from multiple sources — that in the house where he was living a young bride and her father were bitterly falling out. They moved into a friend's house, a shady friend — shadier, perhaps, than they realized — at about the time Shakespeare is writing about a virtuous woman living in a brothel.

Having reread The Subtle Knife , I found I couldn't stop there. And so here we are.

Pullman does a fascinating and complex job of showing his characters grow up without making a fuss or calling attention. In the first book, Lyra has plenty of energy and will, but it's all about hiding from grownups or manipulating them, or running away. She's a child. In The Subtle Knife, she's on her own, alone with Will and her guiding spirit and with a mission she doesn't understand but knows is right. And in The Amber Spyglass, she is in control and in charge and she knows what must be done; she is a woman long before she walks into that murmurous golden glade.

Aaron Swartz raved about this book, even though he says he doesn't usually like novels. It was short-listed for the Booker. In the end, I don't see the attraction. Lodge chronicles the sexual escapades of Jet-Setting English Professors as they fly from conference to conference. None of them seem particularly interested in their research, all of them seem surprisingly interested in misbehaving, none of them seem to enjoy it much or learn anything at all. Some of the characters, I expect, are wicked caricatures of noted critics; Morris Zapp is apparently based on Stanley Fish, I suppose Michel Tardes is Michel Foucault, and I can see how that might turn into an amusing game.