Oldenshaw and Dimmock quote T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" (1922): "Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,/Had a bad cold, nevertheless/Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,/With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,/Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,/(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)/ ... Fear death by water."
George Henderson references a "hollow crown", an allusion to William Shakespeare's 1590s play "Richard II" (act III, scene II): "For God's sake let us sit upon the ground/And tell sad stories of the death of kings:/How some have been depos'd, some slain in war,/Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,/Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping kill'd,/All murdered - for within the hollow crown/That rounds the mortal temples of a king/Keeps Death his court". As he is informed by Dimmock, Oldenshaw misquotes the Bard's "Macbeth" (act V, scene VII): "They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly,/But, bear-like, I must fight the course."
Oldenshaw went to Cambridge University, and calls Dimmock a post-Freudian.