And the sudden death of so many Europeans in the space of barely a fortnight

And the sudden death of so many Europeans in the space of barely a fortnight was hardly mentioned by the BBC.Patten’s discussion of America is a lament. Why has the US let down this liberal, tolerant, internationalist, Catholic Conservative? Yet America simply promotes its own interests as members of Congress, the Supreme Court, state legislatures and the White House define them. The task for Patten’s successors is not to moan about America but to make Europe work. Many years of growth at 3 or 4 per cent a year, with policies to promote jobs and fair pay, a demonstration that Europe can find solutions to the problems of the environment, plus proof that Europe will embrace Muslim Turkey and find ways of engaging with the non-EU Mediterranean world: that will do far more to change US policy than elegant or angry essays.Patten has two great tasks left in public life.

The first, as Chancellor at Oxford, is to help make universities in Britain world-class The second is to help the Tories see sense on Europe. To achieve the former, he will have to take on more than a century of vested-interest bureaucracy and the huge middle-class perk of getting the poor to pay, via taxes, for old Etonians to enjoy low-cost education at Christ Church and Trinity. To achieve the latter, he will have to pray that the Tories keep losing elections until they realise that Europhobia wins headlines in the Rothermere press but turns off voters.If he achieves either, he will deserve the nation’s thanks. And this elegant, warm, clever and readable book shows that, even if he cannot do everything, Patten has done much that is good. British and European politics is the richer for his presence in our public life.Denis MacShane is Labour MP for Rotherham and was Minister for Europe 2002-2005 He now represents Britain on the Council of Europe. You will not find a better book on Shakespeare. Peter Ackroyd, one of the wonders of the scholarly world, has done it again.

Our greatest biographer has once more put the academics to shame. You might have thought it impossible to write a book on Shakespeare that did more than repeat what we already knew. Ackroyd does not have any rabbits to produce from the hat – Shakespeare does not turn out to be a woman or an Arab – but this is the first really plausible account that situates our greatest writer in his time and place. Were this the product of a lifetime of scholarship one would still be astonished by the reach of its historical knowledge and the depth of its literary understanding.

But Ackroyd has not spent his life as a Shakespearean scholar, this biography is one of a series that started just over 20 years ago with a magnificent life of T S Eliot and which includes the best accounts of Charles Dickens, Thomas More and William Blake.
If that were not enough, Ackroyd is also a major novelist and in his youth produced memorable lyric poetry The paradox may not, however, be so great. The fruits of Shakespearean scholarship are abundant; our knowledge of the Elizabethan theatre and Tudor social history is now very extensive; perhaps it needed someone from outside this world of specialists to make it live.The exact secret of how Ackroyd manages to inhale vast quantities ofscholarship, inhabit the writing of another until it becomes his own and then to inscribe a measured account in what cannot, to judge from the bibliography, be much over two years will no doubt remain a mystery.But if the process perplexes, the product illuminates. Ackroyd’s Shakespeare is a man of two places: his native Stratford, birthplace and grave, where he takes his place among the burghers; and his adopted London, where he finds in the new theatre a living which becomes a fortune, and a form which becomes a national treasure. Ackroyd has written nothing finer than the opening 100 pages, where 16th-century Stratford is summoned into life. All the resources of his knowledge and his saturation in Shakespeare’s language combine to make it clear how much Shakespeare’s vocabulary and imagination were formed in the world of a Renaissance town, where new forms of exchange and new forms of classical learning lived side by side.Ackroyd is superb at making the connections which show how small a society Tudor England was – not least in the astonishing web that he traces, which links Shakespeare time and time again to the “recusants” who, at risk to their life and living, continued to practise the Catholic faith.