Shakespeare

William Shakespeare left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. Bill Bryson sorts through this colourful muddle to reveal the man himself. He reveals the efforts of earlier scholars, like Delia Bacon, who developed a conviction that her namesake Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare's plays. Bryson celebrates Shakespeare as a writer of unimaginable talent and enormous inventiveness, a coiner of phrases - 'vanish into thin air', 'foregone conclusion', 'one fell swoop' - that even today have a home at the tips of our tongues. His Shakespeare is like no one else's - the beneficiary of Bryson's genial nature, his engaging scepticism, and a gift for storytelling unrivalled in our time.