The stops bucked here: four writers and punctuation !

Counting cases, faces, and spaces as well as marks, punctuation forms c.70% of the top two layers of a QWERTY keyboard, and writing would be hamstrung without it — yet it is rarely studied. This course looks closely at four writers who really knew how to punctuate, and what they did with it : poets Andrew Marvell (1621–78) & T S Eliot (1888–1965), using the long poems ‘Upon Appleton House’ and The Waste Land ; novelist Herman Melville (1819–91), using extracts from Moby-Dick ; and playwright Martin Crimp (b.1956), using his astonishing Attempts on her Life.