“Drake stirred. Elizabeth of England patted his shoulder as one might a shaggy dog.”

Brahms and Simon wrote the greatest comic fiction of the 20th Century, most of it historical. This extract from their brilliant novel of Shakespearian times was written, incredibly, to bring the book up to a more publishable length. It is at once a great history lesson and beautiful elegy to the past.

Chapter XV of No Bed For Bacon, Black Swan, 2012