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“... the on-ding like a lantern. Under his guava-pink balaclava he looks like Punch – like an Andean shepherd steering his flock through a clouded pass – like the Pied Piper playing us into the hillside: contradictory symbols have begun to form. Commitment time. From now on each perch will be precarious, spreadeagled; retreat from the razor-edge no easier than ...”

“... expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell ...”

“... to the barbarous clangour of a gong’, it was already the case in ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ of 1889 that there weremany changing thingsIn dreary dancing past us whirled,To the cracked tune that Chronos sings.But Yeats was surely also a poet of will, and of an identifiable cluster of themes; and since it seems implausible anyway to claim a ...”

“... here. More than two hundred years later, this sense had not yet faded; with a cheeky rhyme, Robert Burns attributed such devices to the devil: ‘Then you, ye auld, snic-drawing dog!/Ye came to Paradise incog/An’ play’d on man a cursed brogue.’ By the time Burns was writing, ‘brogue’ also commonly described ‘a rude kind of shoe generally ...”

“... peace’. When set beside ‘anti-courtly’ Spenserian verse, ‘To Penshurst’ and ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ ‘give the sense of a nation which, whatever its faults, is essentially harmonious and well-ordered and reflects credit on its governors’. Even so, there are dangers in calling Jonson a ‘court poet’ and a ‘conservative’: more of them ...”

“... 1934 stayed at Ingleton House, a boys’ home in Clapham run by the Anglican Society of the Good Shepherd, and wrote poems, comic operas and humorous essays in the Ingletonian Raconteur. Revelling in the works of Blake, Ruskin and Samuel Palmer, he was inspired by the idea that ‘reality is a thing that has to be reinvented continually.’ With no family to ...”

“... they all knew the dialogue by heart and couldn’t resist mouthing it ahead of the actors. Their shepherd from beyond (Alan Rickman) knew this wasn’t what was needed: his mission was to make sure the living world continued having encounters with the unexpected, even the unthinkable. But he found it difficult to herd the spirits back when their time was ...”

“... off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly from ...”

“... homosexual rape carried out by an older man – specifically, a domineering uncle-guardian named Robert Manning, whose bed and board were shared by the fledgling author before he left for Bowdoin College. (Manning also happened to be, for those who might want to make something of it, the most renowned pomologist in the United States.) For ...”

“... religious belief seriously enough to write a ‘Neo-Thomist Poem’, which reads: The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want him for long.The following year he and Pauline Pfeiffer, whose family had a private chapel in their house, were married in a Catholic church. Archibald MacLeish and his wife, Ada, declined to attend because, as Ada wrote, she ‘was ...”

“... the ascription of three stanzas of the poem to ‘Dux Bucks’ and three more to ‘Fleetwood Shepherd’. Harold Love did not know of these important manuscripts, and seems not to have recognised Lady Rochester’s hand in the British Library manuscript that he chose as his copy-text for ‘Lucina’s Rape’, Rochester’s adaptation of Fletcher’s ...”

“... party had failed him; his grandmother died; the Cross-Bronx Expressway, built by the city planner Robert Moses, ripped through East Tremont, displacing five thousand people. In 1950, Bookchin joined a literary collective led by Josef Weber, a Holocaust survivor, who had brought together a group of former Communists to publish Contemporary Issues, a journal ...”

“... Woyzek, he never stood a chance: ‘Moosbrugger had started out in life as a poor devil, an orphan shepherd boy in a hamlet so small that it did not even have a village street, and his poverty was such that he never dared speak to a girl.’ Rachel is inscribed in the novel as the flesh which Moosbrugger is tormented and brought down by. Before we know ...”

“... techniques involve hiding in handbags, bivouacking in pie dishes and riding a German shepherd dog. In 1940, Eisner created his most famous masked hero: The Spirit was a syndicated series featuring a former detective called Denny Colt who staged his own death and took up residence in a graveyard, whence he made periodic forays into the world of ...”

“... arranged luggage, her face lost to sorrow. They look to be husband and wife. He clutches a shepherd’s crook as his sheepdog nuzzles her hand. Low cloud obscures the hilltops in the background. In the words of the art historian Robin Nicholson, ‘this is an image of complete hopelessness, of lassitude and despair and, in the case of the ...”