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“... at Grantham grammar school by doing better at lessons than them. His mother wanted him to become a farmer, but he defied her by getting a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge at the age of 18. He remained surly and solitary throughout his four undergraduate years, and insisted on reading modern authors like Descartes rather than the Aristotelians he was ...”

“... capital. I always found him among the most entertaining and delightful of companions. But a farmer’s son? It’s hard to imagine anything more incongruous. I’m always fascinated by the succession of fortuities that determine the lives and careers of major artists and how easily their achievements might never have happened. Ashbery’s parents were ...”

“... Shardlake is also an outsider, courteous yet aloof and observant. The son of a Lichfield sheep farmer, he is helped up the social ladder by the most socially mobile of all Tudor lawyers, Thomas Cromwell, yet he remains principled, modest and compassionate, a humanist in the modern as well as the Tudor sense. It’s significant that he is a hunchback, a ...”

“... to the flinty Wyeth’s credit, this overture was rebuffed.’ Nearer home, there was the case of David Sylvester, perhaps the leading British art critic of the second half of the 20th century. Hughes valued him as a friend and a fine analyst; he was also the best exhibition installer of his time. But he was a very slow writer with ‘an indurated ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... 1 January, Yorkshire. Ill over Christmas I say to Ernest Coultherd, a farmer in the village, that my Christmas dinner consisted of a poached egg. ‘Oh. Credit crunch, was it?’ Two dead salmon in the beck just above Mafeking Bridge, both of them huge creatures, nearly two feet long, so big that one wonders how the beck at low water can accommodate them, though there are a few deepish pools ...”

“... as a midshipman in the navy, though to his chagrin he never saw action, and as a gentleman farmer, first on land bequeathed him by his father on the shores of Lake Otsego in upstate New York; and then on a 42-acre property in Scarsdale that belonged to his wife’s family, who owned much of Westchester County. He had enjoyed dabbling in politics, and ...”

“... of the Taliban, sometimes for their tactical ability but mostly for their bravery. Major Martin David, whose thoughtfulness made him seem a reluctant warrior, said: ‘Even when they’re onto a complete loser, they insist on pushing forward. On the one hand you have to admire that determination. On the other hand you feel sort of sad. It’s just a shame ...”

“... which was deplored even at the time of the centenary of publication 38 years ago, when Elizabeth David pointed out that the currently available Mrs Beeton didn’t contain a single recipe from the original. That this is an odd state of affairs does not of itself make a facsimile of the 1861 book an interesting object. People buy and use the modern Mrs Beeton ...”

“... readable because animated by all of Grigson’s brilliant erudition and spirit of advocacy. Lord David Cecil’s long chapter in his 1969 book Visionary and Dreamer: Two Poetic Painters (the other one is Burne-Jones) is a more languid affair, but it usefully brought Cecil’s own Romantic instincts to bear on a painter whose inspiration was often professedly ...”

“... mentioned by Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more ...”

“... for everyone else, then losses due to poisoned groundwater are not reflected in the price of the farmer’s produce. This misaligns market incentives, over-rewarding destructive behaviour.The concept of externality is crucial to the often awkward attempts of economics to analyse human relationships with the non-human world. Pollution, biodiversity loss, soil ...”

“... Hotel in Aberdeen where he heard the ballad singing and stories of John Strachan, an Aberdeenshire farmer who became one of his most important sources. In ‘Journey to a Kingdom’, an unpublished poem written in 1938, Henderson leaves no doubt that these northern excursions were conscious acts of homecoming. In the summer of that year, he took a train north ...”

“... years are a migrating stork, a puppet used to advertise a mobile phone network on television and a farmer who named his donkey ‘Sisi’. Meanwhile the army claims to have discovered a cure for both HIV and Hepatitis C. ‘I take Aids from the patient, and feed the patient on Aids,’ General Ibrahim Abdel-Atti explained. ‘I give it to him as a kofta skewer ...”