Article: The Branagh-Bardic Express: gleaming Pullman cars and cattle-trucks

In one of her stand-up routines Victoria Wood addressed the irritating problem of marginal doodles, particularly in library books, where the reader suddenly finds herself in the company of a third party: "I mean," she explains, "it's a bit disconcerting to flick through a copy of Hamlet to find `This happened to me' scrawled all over Act Four." It's a good joke (it made me laugh anyway) but it rather depends on an assumption that the incidents in Hamlet are so detached from library-users' experiences that the comparison is simply mad or impertinent. And it's true that, however ghastly our own family gatherings turn out to be, most of us are unlikely to stab Uncle Fergus while he's hiding ...

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