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“... over her own want of presence of mind’, and we sense the denial of feelings hidden from herself. John Wiltshire’s finely observed study of Jane Austen’s six completed novels is all about the way she conjures characters’ hidden feelings. His title might lead you to expect some revelation of Austen’s private passions but, while knowledgable about her ...”

“... their way through the corn just over his left shoulder – and undisturbed, too, by an insomniac shepherd who pipes to his sheep in a nearby field of standing sheaves, sitting beneath a tree shaped like a lollipop. ‘The Valley Thick with Corn’ (1825). Altogether these might not sound like the ingredients of a very satisfactory work of art; but the ...”

“... in the topic had first been excited by her reading of Ben Jonson’s Robin Hood play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great rival. Given this history, it may seem surprising that The Shakespearean Forest is not a longer book, but Barton became almost blind as a result of macular degeneration and was forced to abandon her work. When ...”

“... atrocity to atrocity, in one of their series of imaginary conversations, the Noctes Ambrosianae. John Wilson (‘Christopher North’) appears to have been responsible for the horribly inflammatory discussion of the subject there, and to have scripted the contributions assigned to the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. One ...”

“... who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023.Alareer wrote his doctoral dissertation on John Donne. On YouTube, you can find him lecturing, in English, to his students at the Islamic University of Gaza. One lecture begins with a discussion of Horace’s Ars Poetica and the idea that a work of art must delight as well as instruct. ‘The term ...”

“... especially in its literary/dramatic forms, has been a story of kings.) With the exception of King John and Henry VIII, Shakespeare’s English history plays have survived not as one series but two. The first works its way from Henry VI to Richard III. The second turns back into the past to cover the prequel reigns from Richard II to Henry V. It is hard to ...”

“... brilliance, but his work lacks an important ingredient: thought. The same could be said of the shepherd-poet Miguel Hernández, admired in Spain but ignored elsewhere. Lorca’s some-time lover Luis Cernuda could have mounted a serious poetic challenge, but he suddenly rejected Modernism, and his poetry, always lugubrious, became prosaic and ...”

“... Most of the great positive evils of the world,’ John Stuart Mill asserted in 1863, ‘are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced to within narrow limits.’ This sort of confidence in the reality and efficacy of progress now seems to set the 19th century distinctively apart from our own ...”

“... incentive to pretend that they were not fictions at all. There is good evidence, well presented by John Barrell in his dicussion of Gainsborough in The Dark Side of the Landscape, that increasing comfort was derived in the late 18th century from the belief that the hard-working, honest, loyal, loving families clustered around cottage doors which were admired ...”

“... publishers in the 1960s. The one anomaly in Harwood’s bibliography is his inclusion, along with John Ashbery and Tom Raworth, in Volume 19 of the Penguin Modern Poets series, published in 1971. The groupings that Penguin came up with in this admirable series tended to be hit or miss. But the combination of Ashbery, Harwood and Raworth is an interesting ...”

“... in the early 1860s, his eye wandered to a younger woman, Martha Rudd, the daughter of a Norfolk shepherd. Martha was Caroline’s opposite: slow-witted, docile, virginal and a peasant. After the success of The Woman in White Wilkie was a £5000-a-title author, and could afford expensive vices. He persuaded his innocent Norfolk girl to come to London where ...”

“... Church of the Latin Rite, not least that section which remained loyal to the bishop of Rome. John O’Malley illustrates the room in his superb new history of the Council of Trent: the nave of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Trent, a bishopric in the foothills of the Dolomites. In that grand setting, seated on an amphitheatre specially erected for ...”

“... are only the steam which obscures the Mirror of Truth.’ Such is Fish’s description of John Milton, the most obstinately argumentative of all English poets, the most heroically strenuous in matters of the mind, the indefatigable compiler of arguments and corroborative materials, whose watchword, all his life, was ‘freedom’. In an age when the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... turns. At first it seems as if it is going to be a biographical account of the trickster figure of John Laroche, one of the thieves in question. Laroche is an obsessive collector, having been through passionate affairs with turtles, fossils and tropical fish before committing himself to orchids – at least for some of the time Orlean knew him. It is at a ...”