MEDIAPART

François Hollande seems to have gone a bit mad North-North-West. Casting about in that direction for inspiration (that way madness lies), he ascribed a ‘motivational’ soundbyte to Shakespeare: “They failed because they did not begin with a dream”. British newspapers fell over themselves to snigger at the gaffe. Obviously, this was not the work of controversial Elizabethan midlander, William Shakespeare, (or the Earl of Oxford, or Marlowe, or whoever), but the literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, Nicholas Shakespeare. The platitude appears in his first novel, The Vision of Elena Silves (1989): a little-read book that might just up its sales as a result.