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“... investments, yielding 200,000 livres a year – about the same as the income of a general tax farmer such as Claude Dupin. The Hôtel d’Elbeuf, magnificently refurbished by Innocente-Catherine, stood across from the Tuileries, a stone’s throw from the Dupins’ mansion, and she had a second town house, in Versailles.Very rich people can hold ...”

“... been chiming insistently with my reading of Phillip Blond’s Red Tory and my listening to David Cameron’s ‘big society, small government’ speeches. When Cameron speaks of Britain’s ‘atomised’ and ‘broken’ society, and calls for a return to a ‘broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation’, or Blond writes about the ...”

“... South Africa through a European-style industrial revolution compressed into twenty years. David Goldblatt (b.1930) began taking photographs in the gold-mining areas in his teens. Many of them, and the ones that followed, tell the story of South Africa’s labouring classes, predominantly black, in a world shaped by race laws and extractive ...”

“... the fiction of the period. In Middlemarch, the hapless Mr Brooke’s attempt to canvass a tenant farmer called Mr Dagley is met with a violent political diatribe in a dialect so impenetrable that he has to make his excuses and leave. George Eliot waxes ironic at the expense of the local educators and improvers (rector, curate, landlord) who might have been ...”

“... to be going anywhere.’ ‘Why,’ says Ryan, ‘would a man like you be looking for a lousy Jap farmer?’ and the litany of resentment unspools. ‘Loyal? … That’s a laugh. They’re all mad dogs … I wish they’d leave us alone.’ ‘Leave you alone to do what?’ Tracy held his own in the scene magnificently, but later on the set he asked the ...”

“... the Border hills near Beattock on the way to South Uist and Barra. At Oban I’ll rendezvous with David Paterson, a landscape photographer, who’s working with me on a book on the Highland Clearances. As I overtake a worn blue Audi estate, I look sideways and see Dave’s face and grizzled beard. We exchange incoherent signs, pull in a little later on the ...”

“... invasion of the Canadian backwoods; and ‘Claw Cloud’ a surrealistic fantasy about a Midwestern farmer plucked off his tractor and whirled out to sea by a tornado. Other fine pieces are ‘Voices from the Dead: Cowboy’, about a rodeo rider bucked to death by a steer; ‘Rhythm’, which starts out by describing the standard progression of rock-and-roll ...”

“... friend, Gwen. He meets a Ukrainian working for (quarrelling with, perhaps living with) a female farmer who sports a mannish shirt and tie. He feels more comfortable with three North Country boys, amiably dim, making no demands, and with the building workers who suggest he should become their tea boy. It is better to work out of doors, on building ...”

“... students loved him. Modern critics – especially Scottish ones – have been less impressed. For David Daiches, Wilson is an ‘absolute impostor’ and a ‘windbag’; Andrew Noble tags him ‘the clay-footed prophet of the British-Scots middle-class’. In some respects, Wilson deserves all he gets. As an academic he was a charlatan; as a critic a coward ...”

“... it is right that this new prime minister takes the decision about when to trigger Article 50,’ David Cameron said in his resignation speech. Few doubted that the prime minister could send the notification – the question was when it would be sent – but the claimants in Miller challenged this assumption. Treaties are agreements between states. But states ...”

“... heard of him. ‘You should meet him,’ the MP said. A press officer cut in. ‘He’s a Devon farmer, who set up an amazing social programme, which Channel 4 did a documentary on, to help underprivileged black kids from inner cities escape to the countryside, so a bit like working farms or city farms …’ ‘It’s a great story,’ the MP said. ‘Came ...”

“... and paint the Alps from a distance. Muir worked in the Sierra (as shepherd, sawyer and fruit farmer), he explored them for many years on end, and the richness of his writing roots deeper into the terrain than any other wilderness writer known to me. To know this book is on your shelf is like having your woodshed filled with dry peats or your mind with ...”

“... a teacher, a policeman, three ‘lovely lassies’, a rock musician, a turfman and his ass, a farmer and his sheep, at least one neighbour, his mother, and possibly his father as well. Most of these murders are caused, directly or indirectly, by Pat’s relationship with his mother, a fiercely possessive woman who, ‘before that final day when her son ...”

“... to unite grab and labour. The Americas, east of the Divide, gave a generous opportunity to the farmer – if he could survive the first few years. The driving force behind Bailyn’s work is the opportunity provided by the official British enquiry into emigration from the end of 1773 to 1776. These were the years in which the relationship between ...”

“... used to say. The new version is ‘Zimbabwe is kenge,’ which means roughly the same thing. David Caute’s portrait of white mores is savage, but like so many visitors before and after him, he was fascinated – seduced – by Rhodesia. It was, and is, a country which captivates even as it appals, and it has always been so much easier to explain the ...”