Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom (Fourth Estate, £12.99 in UK)

`All we can hope for is to be wrong about Shakespeare in a new way", T.S. Eliot wrote, and the American critic, Harold Bloom, has the humility to quote this approvingly. His own claims that Shakespeare invented human personality are bafflingly overstated and selective. They rest on a distinction between "personality" and "character": the classical Greek tragedians, apparently, were concerned only with character, which conveniently rules them out of any further discussion. Bloom is consciously returning to a 19th-century vein of Shakespeare criticism, echoing Bradley and Carlyle's emphasis on the psychology of the plays' principal characters. If, as he hopes, Shakespeare's work survives the depredations of the literary theorists that he reviles, it will be no thanks to his Bardolatry.