Sonnets

Love sonnets are for romantics, starry-eyed lovers and ardent hearts. And Shakespeare's sonnets are the best ever written. But this is why they are also for cynics, for star-crossed lovers and for those who know the anguish of unrequited love.

Some appear to be written to a young man, some to a woman. And although the poems are full of mystery - why did Shakespeare write them, and to whom? - each one speaks to us from across the centuries of love, hate and the intensity of being alive.

INTRODUCED BY ANDREW McMILLAN

'This is a crazy, all-consuming, feverish and sweaty love; love, in all its uncut, full-strength intensity; an adolescent love' Don Paterson, Guardian

Review: The great master who knew everything...an unspeakable source of delight-Charles Dickens

Every age has reinvented the Bard in its own image. Renaissance Man or post-modern angst... Shakespeare haunts our language-Independent

Shakespeare was the most consummate genius of all time-Peter Ackroyd

Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them, there is no third-T.S. Eliot