Authors vary between those who name real places, those who lightly veil them and the inventors . . . . For visionaries, locality is the starting trap out of which the imagination streaks”: so writes Toby Barnard in his review of the latest edition of the Oxford Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland, indispensable to the literary pilgrim and the armchair tourist alike. Whether, braving the rains of August, you go in search of Philip Larkin’s spectacles or a frisson of enforced intimacies at Haworth or Chawton, Visions of England or topographical minutiae, the Guide’s “prodigious plenty” will amuse and inform you.

Along with Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery was vital “in popularizing the biographical approach” that finds its logical conclusion in treks to Bateman’s (Rudyard Kipling) or Ballyshannon (William Allingham), while “the passionate sightseer dithers between Constable and Shakespeare Country”. Lois Potter, Bart van Es, Emma Smith and Jonathan Bate all take us to Shakespeare country this week, the first three in reviews of bold new approaches to familiar plays, the last in a Commentary that offers another Master W.H., “a proud boy from Wales” yes, but an Earl, no, as the dedicatee of the Sonnets – and in so doing shows the limits of that very same biographical approach. Adrian Forty discusses the sibling rivalry between architects and engineers, Gabriel Josipovici discovers peace, exhilaration and a whole new way of being modern in the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi, Heather O’Donoghue looks at “the opportunities for cheap thrills” in historical crime fiction, and Bernard O’Donoghue – yes, they are related – is saluted as a poet whose poems, set in England, Ireland or on a drive to the ferry between them “have a tendency to be stopped in their own tracks”.

Alan Jenkins

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