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“... their families to the coast. The inspiration behind the scheme was George Lansbury, the subject of John Shepherd’s biography, a book as meticulous as it is generous. It is nonetheless timely: just as the prison service has brown-filled this pleasant site, so, too, New Labour has trampled on the radical socialism of which Lansbury was one of the finest ...”

“... muse lets rip through the rat-a-tat of Blind Hary’s Wallace; and in the brassy Reformation of John Knox it blares even in the sophisticated George Buchanan’s over-the-top ‘Elegy for Jean Calvin’. The volume remains high in some of Robert Fergusson’s sophistic-performative street-talk, Burns’s on-off, rip-roaring ‘Tam ...”

“... a fictional symposium that ran in the paper between 1822 and 1835. The author of the Noctes was John Wilson, who constructed dialogues between his own alter ego (‘Christopher North’) and that of Hogg (‘the Shepherd’). The Shepherd gets the best lines – better, some have ...”

“... Early 19th-century Edinburgh had a lot less time for James Hogg than for the Ettrick Shepherd, the literary persona created partly by Hogg himself, partly by the tight circle that ran Blackwood’s Magazine. Comic, bibulous, full of naive folk-wisdom, easy to patronise, the Ettrick Shepherd was invented as a souvenir of the pastoral Lowlands, a survival whose presence among one of the Edinburgh literary élites could represent both the continuity of modern Scots culture and the impolite past it had left behind ...”

“... and replacing the nationalist agenda with the world view of the European New Left (think of John Lennon)’. Their targets included Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, who were criticised for peopling their work with neurotic characters; leading artists, for following cosmopolitan fashion; educationalists, for the decline in the teaching of the Bible, the Talmud ...”

“... Sunday Times book, Philby, the spy who betrayed a generation, which he co-authored in 1968. Mr John Costello has produced Mask of Treachery, dealing with Blunt, while Mr Robert Cecil has written a biography of his former Foreign Office colleague Donald Maclean. To round things out, we have The Storm Birds, Gordon Brook-...”

“... grass there than you’d expected, you can bet. So I wandered fleecy as a cloud and one day an old shepherd crossed my path, looking very wise with his crook. How much use do you get out of that thing, I asked him. Depends, he replied. Sometimes one of ’em doesn’t go astray for months on end. Other times I’ve got my hands full with them running around in ...”

“... may have glimpsed the shadowy, not to say meteoric, not to say dubious presence of the publisher John Macrone, and learned of his prompt desire, after Scott’s death in September 1832, to write his Life, basing it to a large extent on rural informants. Here was the promise of a main event in the comet’s six-year visit to the Anglo-Scottish cultural ...”

“... have sat comfortably in a tradition of Scottish eccentricity that includes James Hogg’s The Shepherd’s Calendar, John Galt’s ‘theoretical histories’ and Margaret Oliphant’s tales of terror. It’s common to think of Blackwood’s as a stolid redoubt of middlebrow English respectability, the kind of torpid ...”

“... likely that this autumn we will be shooting The Lady in the Van. This is the story of Miss Mary Shepherd, the elderly eccentric who took up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death 15 years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and all being well will star in the film ...”

“... and had probably already been written about. The material was also going to be sliced wafer thin. John Costello and Oleg Tsarev had already engaged to write about Alexander Orlov and reveal him as the éminence grise behind the Cambridge ring. It was proposed that I should collaborate with former Colonel Yuri Modin and do the Cambridge ring in the post-war ...”

“... Denis: ‘Marnie – wig, smell and all’; ‘Sam Smith, MP for Flint and religious bore’; ‘John Bulman, tutor, whisky lover and cheat’; ‘The misery of picnics’; ‘The Palship, dressed to kill ... ’ In triumphant contrast, there is: ‘Myself at 11, fisherman, child musicologist and budding atheist’. A Welsh Childhood is also strengthened by ...”

“... will always be more industrious than others. The ploughman probably works harder than the shepherd or the woodcutter, the milkmaid is generally a more realistic image of rural labour than the shepherdess, but the significant feature of all these characters as represented in the art of rural life is that they combine the Arcadian and the actual. Dr ...”

“... Ministry of Labour notepaper. Exactly how Macleod’s marriage worked is a question which Robert Shepherd is far too respectful to answer. Inevitably, Macleod’s wit and somewhat dissolute charm appealed far more to Tory selection committees than did Powell’s heavy earnestness, hunting pink or no. In 1948 Macleod was selected for the safe seat of ...”

“... John Charles Robinson​ , perhaps the greatest connoisseur Britain has ever known, was turned down on four occasions for the post of director of the National Gallery. He was thought to be too closely associated with the trade (‘little better than a dealer’), and was known to have operated with scant respect for officialdom when employed by the South Kensington museum ...”