Boris Johnson offered to pay for help writing Shakespeare biography, says scholar

Academic was asked to be available at short notice ‘when Johnson found space in his diary’, but turned the project down

One of the UK’s most eminent Shakespeare scholars has revealed that they were approached by a representative of Boris Johnson to help him write his very delayed biography of the Bard.

The book, titled Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius, and Johnson’s failure to finish it, recently made its way back into the news after Downing Street was forced to deny rumours that the prime minister had missed important Cobra meetings during the pandemic in order to work on the manuscript.

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