Search Results

“... accounts for much of Powell’s irresistible lure to biographers – judging by his bibliography, Shepherd’s is the tenth so far, which may be a record for a living politician. (Powell himself dismisses all notion of writing his memoirs – ‘like a dog returning to its own vomit’.) Shepherd has included a large ...”

“... gloves, which were unsporting. No gesture was involved, but a certain amount of quiet conviction. John Betjeman and Joan Hunter-Dunn would have approved: indeed Betjeman was a great admirer of Blunden’s poetry. His English Poems ‘was the first book by a living poet I remember saving up to buy. I learned many of his poems by heart and can still recite them ...”

“... player of the year would be depressingly more expensive than the best novelist.) Only once, with John Berger in 1972, has a winner been graceless enough to allude publicly to the source of the prize-money in black men’s sweat. Booker judges change every year and the one stable element is Martyn Goff, the éminence grise of the panel which chooses the ...”

“... protect Jaffa’s Arabs from eviction. For Israel’s new historians, among them Segev and Naomi Shepherd, the Zionist project is part of the saga of white settlement, as in North America and Rhodesia. The settlers declared independence only when they no longer required the Mother Country’s soldiers to subdue the natives. Presenting Israelis as ...”

“... running the risk of recalling, in mid-reading, Dudley Moore’s interview with Peter as Arthur Shepherd in Behind the Fridge: SHEPHERD: Er, basically, what happened was that me and the lads were abiding in the fields. REPORTER (writing): Abiding in the fields, yes. ...”

“... flexing of comic power in The Isle of Dogs (1597) to the last melancholy fragments of The Sad Shepherd, probably written in the final year of his life. During that time he wrote 18 plays, 37 masques and court entertainments, two volumes of poetry and a volume of epigrams. This list does not include the lost plays from his days as one of Henslowe’s hacks ...”

“... which of them were homosexuals and so on, Cornish dodgily assuming, as did Andrew Boyle and John Costello before him, that homosexuality is itself a bond and that if two men can be shown to be homosexual the likelihood is that they’re sleeping together. So we trail down that road looking for cliques and coteries with even G.M. Trevelyan’s sexual ...”

“... belongs to our God” ’. These events usher in the new heaven and earth foreseen by St John where righteousness reigns and death is no more. The present inheritors of this apocalyptic strain in Christendom, evangelical missionaries attached to Protestant Churches in the United States, are engaged, therefore, in an urgent mission to reach the last ...”

“... scenery is not so suitable or well-adapted for the camera.’ The firm of Bourne and Shepherd still exists, in reduced state – the catalogue includes a 1996 photograph of the Calcutta studio (they set up there in 1867). Stucco peels from the brickwork, while a modern sign for Kodak film on the gatepost points to our own photographic ...”

“... as many natural things: ‘Exit, pursued by a bear.’ The bear is immediately succeeded by the Shepherd and Clown, who are illogical, shrewd and kind, and nothing surprises them. Their natural kindness is what Samuel Johnson said all social goodness really is, palliative rather than radical – and in that a striking contrast to the ...”

“... William Cobbett of Rural Rides, a farmer’s son and himself a farmer from time to time; John Muir of My First Summer in the Sierra, a farmer’s son and farmer; and Lewis Grassic Gibbon of A Scots Quair, a farmer’s son from the Mearns in north-east Scotland. All three produced work that strikes me as special – as important, if you like ...”

“... the poor, idle and criminal classes, and to attempts by various reformers, notably the Tukes and John Conolly, to institute a system of humanitarian care for their patients. After these early steps away from the cruel and barbarous treatment of the mad of the preceding centuries, the medical profession began the process of putting the treatment of the mental ...”

“... and local scenes almost invariably depict figures in a rural landscape: rustics like the mower and shepherd labour at their daily tasks, children play with boats and kites, anglers and sportsmen pursue their quarry. The scenes are often droll, occasionally lachrymose and invariably informed by a strong sense of man’s relation to nature. The illustration that ...”

“... John Crowley’s novels are hard to describe. His best one, Little, Big (1981), is probably something you might call ‘fantasy’. It contains talking trout, and little people, and witches in New York, and an attempt by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa to rule the world again, which is thwarted by a family who possess a magic deck of cards ...”

“... with a clear idea of what they want to be like. (This has something in common with the poetry of John Ashbery, who praised White’s first novel, in words that could easily be used to evoke his own work, as the ‘account of an almost terminally sophisticated society’.) The beautiful room is empty has several characters who come to life in the ...”