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“... revolution which occurred in Ireland in his lifetime. This revolution created a large class of farmer owner-occupiers and accentuated the divide between rural ‘haves’ and rural ‘have nots’. There was simply no evidence that those who got ownership of their land hankered after a Gaelic system of common-ownership. In the foreword to Labour in Irish ...”

“... CND, his contempt for the New English Bible, his delight in nude bathing, and his belief that if David Owen had stayed in the Labour Party he would have become its leader. All his columns were eagerly followed, but one series excited particular attention. He reported that his wife, the Hungarian historian Eva Haraszti, was in hospital, and chronicled the ...”

“... and friend. There are at least two reasons for this. The story has often been told, notably by David Cannadine, of how the long agricultural depression broke the power of the British aristocracy, but it also drove tenant famers and labourers off the land and into the cities and suburbs; a million or more had emigrated by 1914. As a legacy of this flight ...”

“... town of Mostyska, squinting at a transliteration of the Mourner’s Kaddish on my phone. A local farmer had directed my guide towards a couple of stubs of rock, the only remnants of dozens of gravestones that had long ago been removed for use as building materials. Brown hens pecked at the grass. It was impossible to tell where my ancestors were buried or ...”

“... diary might not be quite a classic, but it becomes one in the hands of its exemplary editor David Vaisey, who has trimmed it to not much more than a third of its original length, and richly supplemented its information about the village’s inhabitants and about Turner’s family and business. In this way he quietly helps to substantiate the observation ...”

“... televised debate, epitomises his ambivalent relationship with the medium. In Nixon’s Shadow, David Greenberg argues that Nixon was the first American president pre-eminently concerned with the construction of his image.* Unlike Kennedy, his nemesis, Nixon was a self-made man; he didn’t have the benefit of an extremely wealthy and well-connected ...”

“... portrait of a young man who for much of the time would rather be a subaltern, a historian, a pig farmer, indeed anything at all, than an artist. It is a book about ‘pure letters’, and about much else besides, about politics, and suicide, and market-gardening. Literature, Ford wants to say, however luminous, cannot escape its own inconsequence; and he ...”

“... towards his father come out in his depiction of Anse, the mean-spirited and sly little dirt-farmer. The contrasting natures of the half-brothers, Darl and Jewel, hint at Faulkner’s image of himself as the peculiar one in the family. Karl’s handling of this discussion is full and subtle. Nevertheless, there are some weaknesses associated with the ...”

“... so that, years later, it can be used as a paperweight, never far from the poet’s hand: Fell farmer, railwayman and publican, I strive to keep my lines direct and straight, and try to make connections where I can – the knuckleduster’s now my paperweight! Men and Woman is Frederick Seidel’s first appearance from an English publisher. American ...”

“... more than twenty-five years, the fate of the Lake Taupo was unclear. Then, in 1930, Jack Dennet, a farmer and amateur philatelist in Lincolnshire, discovered it in one of his old albums. Times were hard for English agriculture and Dennet was in trouble, having bought stock the previous year which was now depreciating at an alarming rate. Much later, he wrote ...”

“... often virtually, although not intentionally, incognito must have made this easier. From an Irish farmer he learns about the harvesting and propagation of oysters. From an official in the Paris morgue that suicide by drowning is significantly less frequent when the water is freezing cold. The prince brought no obvious political or religious theories or ...”

“... Robin Blackburn describes the finance companies selling pension schemes as a new form of tax farmer, offering dubious deals in return for tax subsidies and lavish commissions. The analogy indicates the tenor of his thinking: tax farmers contributed to the lack of legitimacy of the Ancien Régime. Might discontent with returns on pensions, a growing sense ...”

“... brandy and everyone else is still drinking wine?’ ‘Terry,’ the self-described Delta dirt farmer replies, ‘there was a saying in currency in the court of the Emperor Napoleon at the beginning of the last century: “Claret is for the ladies, and port for men but brandy is for the heroes.” ’ Morris’s account of his tenure as editor-in-chief of ...”

“... for New Times’ – a general political statement or programme – and a fable for the 1990s by David Edgar. The book is long, and since several contributors are responsible for more than one essay, there is a good deal of repetition. Tighter editorial control would have done no harm, though that might have been construed as inhibiting the openness of the ...”

“... of Richard Vinen’s superb history, the best accounts of National Service were fictional: David Lodge’s Ginger, You’re Barmy is a particularly successful evocation of the miseries and absurdities of the conscript’s life.* But Vinen, who was born in 1963, when the last national serviceman was demobbed, draws on memoirs, interviews and official ...”