For some reason or other, our noble post-lockdown efforts to get back out there and waste money in bookshops, ideally out-of-the-way bookshops with a properly eccentric stock, led us straight to Waterstones in Gower Street. On a warm afternoon in June, we headed for the cool basement (whither Waterstones has relegated the secondhand books that formerly occupied some daylit space upstairs), only to find that this fine department was, temporarily, closed. Service at ground level, where we settled for a couple of safely small purchases, was unsmiling. Otherwise, the most to be gained from this misadventure was the thought that Malet Street, if cut off from traffic as it should be, would make a fine spot for an open-air books market, like the one under Waterloo Bridge.

Rooting around elsewhere, a book came into our hands of which only 250 copies were printed, in 1927; this is eccentric enough for us. Gathered Together is a slim work by Helen and Philip Gosse, with illustrations, such as the one reproduced here, by Joyce Garrick. It is a collection (“or contesseration”) of “gathering” words. The Gosses take many of these terms from the fifteenth-century Book of Saint Albans, attributed to Dame Juliana Berners; and they try to stick to what they see as terms that are “genuine”, despite their friends’ “tempting” coinages and colloquialisms: a giggle of girls, a bundle of nerves, a packet of fags. They don’t seem to suspect Dame Juliana, or whoever their great predecessors in meta-contesseration were, of having some fun of their own.

Here, therefore, we are given the obvious swarm of bees and a bevy of ladies; but here, too, are a medieval drunkenship of cobblers and a threatening of courtiers, a busyness of ferrets and a skulk of friars. A neverthriving of jugglers damns, whereas an eloquence of lawyers flatters. Wishful thinking may be heard in a diligence of messengers and a discretion of priests; but has social realism not inspired a laughter of ostlers, a disworship of Scots and a boast of soldiers?

The Gosses include a separate list of “modern” collective nouns in Gathered Together, many of which, unsurprisingly, lack the descriptive tang of their fifteenth-century predecessors. Does a shoal of letters carry a hint of the nautically connected 1800s? It is not easy, meanwhile, to muster serious enthusiasm for the virtually tautological constellation of stars or the heaven-sent shower of blessings.

Alas: the temptation has come upon us to gather a few new terms for gatherings – not least certain bookish gatherings, of novelists or poets, editors or critics. The internet has many suggestions of its own, of course: a pan of reviewers; a volume of authors; an indolence of poets. There are surely advances on this jumble of words to be made. What would be the correct term for a gathering of booksellers – ideally, on broad and leafy Malet Street?

The saga of the prime minister’s Shakespeare biography continues. Subtitled “The riddle of genius”, this fabled volume was first due to be published in October 2016, only a little late for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. News of the book’s progress (or a lack thereof), as Boris Johnson has expended his energies on lesser pastimes, has come and gone. It was suggested in April 2019 that this riddled work of genius would perhaps appear in a year’s time. This cultural highlight must be what Johnson had in mind when he tweeted that 2020 was going to be a “fantastic year for Britain”.

More recently came the denial that Johnson had worked on his Shakespeare book at all since contorting his way into Downing Street two years ago – despite a mischievous rumour to the contrary. Late last month, the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald heard from a local “Shakespeare expert” who had been invited to “semi-dictate” the work. Contacted via a literary agent – Johnson is represented by the esteemed Rogers, Coleridge and White – the anonymous expert would have had to remain on call to “supply Mr Johnson (and a dictaphone) with answers to questions about Shakespeare”. Only the agent “really hadn’t thought out the logistics that would have been involved in getting someone from Stratford to Westminster at short notice whenever Johnson found a gap in his diary for another briefing session, even if I had been keener on the proposition than I was”.

Many Shakespeare scholars, including TLS contributors such as Emma Smith and Jonathan Bate, have commented humorously on the case of the “riddle of genius”; none claims to be the anonymous scholar who was asked to answer extensive questions or fact-check the book, as the historian Warren Dockter did for Johnson’s earlier effort, The Churchill Factor. So who is the lucky Shakespearean? We could have sleuthed around, in the arduously conventional journalist spirit; but it seemed more in keeping with the subject in hand to analyse the unknown scholar’s statements for verbal revelations of identity, via some advanced stylometric tests of our own devising.

“At the time [of the job offer] Mr Johnson hadn’t yet betrayed his continent by choosing to advocate the UK’s departure from the EU for his own personal advantage”: you can rule out the Shakespeare scholars who voted Leave in the referendum of 2016. “The originality and brilliance, his agent assured me, would lie in Mr Johnson’s choice of questions to ask and in the inimitable way in which he would write up the expert answers he received”: a clear familiarity with the “inimitable” language of the Johnsonian oeuvre (see Friends, Voters, Countrymen and Lend Me Your Ears) reveals itself. “You have to admit it’s a brilliant system … asking questions viva voce and then rhetorically spicing up the answers is much quicker than actually reading books”: we sense a working knowledge of undergraduate tactics.

At last we narrowed it down to a couple of suspects, and our findings are to be published in full in a forthcoming issue of Studies in Spaffology: Johnson’s Shakespearean is either the Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon. You read it here first.

A humble reminder. You still have until July 20 to show some financial support for the pleasant dream of seeing a first English sculpture celebrating W. B. Yeats erected, in his old London stamping ground of Bedford Park. See NB, May 28, for further details; or make straight for the website to make a donation. The project has gathered 90 per cent of the funding pledges it needs. Please forgive the sleeve-tug. We merely think it would be a pity if the campaign failed now because just a few more minds were too busy moving like long-legged flies upon the stream to do their bit.

Correspondence. We paid homage to the scholar Priscilla Bawcutt. Jonathan Falla recalled how Mrs Bawcutt, “with her usual calm and precision”, had shown that the fabled circle of Scottish Renaissance poets and composers at the court of King James VI, known as the “Castalian Band”, had been a fiction (June 18). Now N. W. Bawcutt writes with a clarification: the point was not that the Castalian Band never existed, but that “it referred to the Muses”. Thus, Mr Johnson, are calm and precision vindicated.