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“... the reason novelists and short-story writers are often quite distinct breeds). The American writer David Means will have none of this. His highly original stories are coats that have been reversed to show their linings. Rather than lightly hint at an exquisite pattern or organising symbol, he likes to accentuate the pattern, to dash it in the reader’s ...”

“... Smith claimed, been translated from gold tablets that he unearthed from a local hillside. Smith, a farmer’s son, said he’d been directed to the hill by an angel, and the book was therefore evidence of Smith’s own status as a prophet, as well as of a new dispensation of Christ’s gospel on earth. The Mormon canon also includes the Old and New ...”

“... and upright fellow can endure. Tom is engulfed by waves of darkness. ‘Time,’ calls a jolly old Farmer with his eyes on his gun-metal Hunter. He compels the slimy Italian owner of the Booth, who has already let the match last for five and a half minutes, to hand over Tom’s prize. ‘Well done, young ’un,’ says Kildare a few hours later (little knowing ...”

“... by labour, with an archaic intensity – as if body, fabric and landscape were all one. Here is farmer John Radcliffe, a mass of creases and mud, stitched and darned repairs. His cat has crept into shot. When Killip brought Radcliffe a print of this photograph, he folded it carefully till it could vanish into his coat pocket.In 1975, Killip was awarded a ...”

“... studies fixture. It established her as a standard-bearer for the ‘new British realism’, in David Forrest’s phrase: an attempt to build on Ken Loach’s dialectical or discursive approach to the social and political realities of working-class life by developing a more ‘poetic’ or ‘phenomenological’ emphasis. The phenomenology has been thought ...”

“... part of the province’s culture. The first night, I sit up with the film’s director, David Hammond, adding bits to the script. We’re in the sunroom, as he calls it – a big glass-domed upstairs sitting-room at the back of his house. Purple summer dark, stars, streetlights climbing Divis, or the Black Mountain, as it’s called. We stare out at ...”

“... islanders, on Mingulay especially, did to earn a livelihood. Early in the 19th century the Pabbay farmer-fishermen used to buy seabirds’ feathers on Mingulay to sell on at Greenock and elsewhere. They still went fowling in the 1880s, when the craft had died out among the Mingulay folk, and roped down the first few hundred feet of those colossal ...”

“... were in too much of a hurry to exploit their new estates. In one Staffordshire village a greedy farmer found that his neighbours had destroyed his grass by driving their hay-wains four abreast through it. His handling of statstics is sometimes rather wooden, but again many of the conclusions are worthwhile, showing, for example, what a small affair the ...”

“... that Picturesque vista. Wordsworth writes his Guide to the Lakes (1835), which idealises the hill farmer as the type of the sturdy Englishman, neither drudge nor parasite. Ruskin is drawn by what he sees as the acme of terrestrial beauty and ensconces himself above Coniston Water as a grumpy sage. With Canon Rawnsley of Wray near Windermere, and following ...”

“... became a highwayman Turpin belonged to a gang of poachers in Essex. When they robbed a 70-year-old farmer, Joseph Lawrence, in 1735, they beat him on the bare buttocks, poured boiling water over him, and sat him on the fire in order to force him to say where his money was kept. Turpin played an active part in torturing Lawrence, though not in raping his ...”

“... In J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Disgrace, which is set in a violent post-apartheid South Africa, David Lurie, a Cape Town academic, reaches a similar conclusion when his daughter Lucy is gang-raped by three black men at her isolated homestead in the Eastern Cape. ‘But why did they hate me so?’ Lucy asks. ‘I had never set eyes on them.’ ‘It was ...”

“... The real-world example Olson gave was farmers in the American grain market. If a selfless farmer, worried about the suffering of his colleagues because of depressed prices, decided to lower his own production levels in order to raise prices, it would be a pointless gesture, because overall price levels would be unaffected by a single decision of this ...”

“... face the prospect of a lifetime’s hard labour on the land. After just such a life, his own auld farmer addressed his auld mare in these words: Mony a sair darg we twa hae wrought, An’ wi’ the weary warl’ fought! An’ mony an anxious day I thought     We wad be beat! Yet here to crazy age we’re brought,     Wi’ something yet. Burns ...”

“... his former partner, Samantha Stobbart, her new boyfriend, Chris Brown, and a traffic policeman, David Rathband, setting in motion a massive manhunt. You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] is written in the Capote tradition, and Hankinson mentions Gordon Burn in his acknowledgments. The basic strategy of the genre, as Tom Wolfe ...”

“... uncovered by an Indian social anthropologist supposedly writing a dissertation on the peasant farmer culture of the Nile delta. Here the matter of language comes fully into view. Fragments preserved in Cairo and collected by British and American universities allow the narrator (who struggles with Arabic) to follow the trail of one of history’s ...”