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“... was believed to be a descendant of Genghis Khan, but Tamburlaine makes him into a ‘Scythian shepherd’: as remote from ruling elites as a Canterbury shoemaker, but capable of defeating all the feudal despots who attempt to destroy him by virtù alone. Marlowe’s blank-verse Conan the Barbarian remakes himself into a conqueror of the world in the image ...”

“... taught at UC San Diego alongside Rae Armantrout) or others in her generational cohort, like Michael Palmer or her sister Susan Howe. But one senses that the intention is different. She never rejected first-person experience as a basis of her lyrics; Robert Lowell’s Notebook poems were an early influence (‘When Lowell relaxed into the sonnet form, he ...”

“... you don’t want to worry about that. They’re all the same.’ At which point (we are in Shepherd’s grocers) I hear myself as very rarely shouting at the top of my voice. ‘No, they are not all the same. This lot are self-seeking liars, the cabinet included, and we’re landed with them for another five years.’ She tries to calm me down but I ...”

“... a scientific experiment by plucking two newborn babies from their families, handing them over to a shepherd, ordering him never to speak to them and to keep them in solitary confinement, with only a nanny goat coming by occasionally to feed them. Then, as the infants began to talk, they’d reveal the natural language of humanity. The experiment was ...”

“... or the idea that all such pagan stuff is wicked or false. In Lycidas the golden shepherd of Graeco-Roman pastoral is played against the stern, responsible shepherd of the Gospels; each has his proper music, producing together a polyphonic effect. When we are in the Christian register we are told that ...”

“... the Jedi Master we’re in. That sinking feeling hits bottom as early as Psalm 23: The LORD is my shepherd,             I shall not want. In grass meadows He makes me lie down (And, almost needless to say, for ‘He restoreth my soul,’ Alter has ‘My life He brings back.’) The incessant inversion, combined with the predilection for ...”

“... has been studying apparitions in Late Medieval Spain. St Ildefonso, St Anthony of Padua and St Michael the Archangel all made their appearance, but the dominant figure was that of the Virgin Mary. At Jaen in 1430, for example, four people saw the Virgin as a tall lady in white: ‘From this lady issued so much brightness that she shone as the sun ...”

“... wit when it is devoted to the repression, rather than the defence, of religious dissent. As Michael Wilding points out in Dragons Teeth, changes made by Sir Thomas Browne to Religio Medici in the political crisis of 1642-3 reveal the famously ambiguous wit of that text as defensively conservative. The critical climate is now changing. The books under ...”

“... Opium and its effects here receive the jawgrinding judgment of James Hogg, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1823, soon after the appearance of Thomas de Quincey’s celebrated Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Hogg delivers what might be called the Scottish verdict on this awesome substance, a substance full of Eastern ...”

“... to be my last prose piece. All sorts of considerations make me believe it’s high time this shepherd boy stopped writing and sending off prose pieces and retired from a pursuit apparently beyond his abilities. I’ll gladly look about for another line of work that will let me break my bread in peace.’ Walser found further retreats and retirements. He ...”

“... of protecting others, whatever it takes. That’s not being impulsive – it’s deciding to be a shepherd instead of a sheep. The extent to which cowboys are normal people, the extent to which normal people are normal people, were questions that came up all the time in the film-making career of John Ford, a career that lasted fifty years, and which one way ...”

“... the psychologically ruined war veteran Septimus Smith. In that novel the two didn’t meet, though Michael Cunningham, refracting the material in The Hours, had his modern-day Clarissa figure care for Richard, his version of Septimus, worn down by the struggle with HIV. The ending, suicide by jumping, was the same in both books.Murphy has set out, in ...”

“... with their knowledge of current affairs and hone their interview techniques. ‘I like that Michael Howard,’ says one. ‘And Kenneth Clarke’s a good bloke too.’ Neither boy, I suppose, has ever known anything but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then ...”

“... Joseph’s head is too large for his body in the centre of the very early Holy Family with a Shepherd; the relationship between the left knee and the left foot of Saint Catharine in the Aldobrandini Madonna of twenty years later is no less puzzling; and thirty years after that there is the awkward collision of Christ’s arm with that of the Pharisee in ...”

“... If​ universities had been an invention of the second half of the 20th century,’ Michael Dummett wondered in his last book, The Nature and Future of Philosophy (2010), ‘would anyone have thought to include philosophy among the subjects that they taught and studied?’ Dummett’s anxiety wasn’t whether philosophy could survive at a time when the value of a university education is gauged in increasingly reductive, economic terms ...”