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“... In April 1979 a cover-story in Time Magazine, always a sensitive indicator of American public opinion, was entitled ‘Psychiatry on the Couch’. The verdict was unequivocal, even though expressed in the form of a mock-clinical formulation:   History: European-born. After sickly youth in the US, travelled to Vienna and returned as Dr Freud’s Wunderkind ...”

“... on the history of the York Retreat, and the two volumes of essays edited by Bynum, Porter and Shepherd, pay eloquent testimony to the transformation effected in the history of psychiatry over the last twenty or thirty years. The works of Foucault, Erving Goffman, Thomas Szasz and R.D. Laing, and more recently the contributions of Andrew Scull and a new ...”

“... reference swells to majestic grandeur in Wilfrid Israel: German Jewry’s Secret Ambassador. Naomi Shepherd’s biography labours under a severe handicap: while her subject is remembered by many with awe and gratitude, very little documentary evidence of his work remains. Einstein described him as ‘one of the finest and most noble individuals I have ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... nor livestock, they lived from the sale of their labour in turf-walled crofts. Like Bjartur, the shepherd settler-hero of the great Laxness novel Independent People (1934-35), fish was most of what they ate, and if not fish as we know it, then lumpfish or stockfish or torsk or ‘refuse fish’ or coalfish. Tobacco was chewed or sniffed. Coffee was an ...”

“... is too easy.24 October. In an interview for the Observer this morning Robert McCrum congratulates Michael Frayn on being more of a free spirit than others of his generation, ‘Michael Winner and Alan Bennett being prisoners of their own celebrity’.Prisoners possibly but I hope we’re not in the same cell.14 ...”

“... in the topic had first been excited by her reading of Ben Jonson’s Robin Hood play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great rival. Given this history, it may seem surprising that The Shakespearean Forest is not a longer book, but Barton became almost blind as a result of macular degeneration and was forced to abandon her work. When ...”

“... In the National Theatre’s inaugural season in 1963 Michael Redgrave played Claudius to Peter O’Toole’s Hamlet. Apart from Olivier, the theatre’s first director, Redgrave, then aged 55, was its greatest star. Known to the public from his many film roles, and having just been named actor of the year by the Evening Standard for his Uncle Vanya at Chichester, which one critic called ‘the highest level of acting the contemporary theatre has to offer’, he was good box-office ...”

“... A good pile of muck was a glad sight to the farmer. And Constable was careful to paint, as Michael Rosenthal points out, not only the way it is shovelled and carried off, but, in a delightful miniature scene in the middle distance, the way it is ploughed in. This was a surprising wedding present, we may suppose, to paint for the daughter of a local ...”

“... machine, working independently of electricity, oil, water or coal, made of wood by an Albanian shepherd. Describing Herbert’s marriage to Mary Vesey, at which the bride had the support of 14 adult bridesmaids, all daughters of peers, she resists any temptation to say that it must have been funny as well as vulgar. It seems we could have had a life of ...”

“... of personality by paraphrasing the recollections in his own words. Only Imogen Holst and Sir Michael Tippett have escaped this platitudinous reworking since their contributions had appeared previously elsewhere, and the effect of their words is of a far higher intensity than that of the others’. The absurd though sympathetic grandeur of Tippett’s ...”

“... drawn to one figure in Zach Sodenstern’s Gunther O’Connell saga, ‘a mutant, stray German Shepherd with telepathic powers and Nazi tendencies’. ‘He tried desperately to make friends,’ we hear of a literary editor, ‘but enemies were all he ever had.’ The Duchess of Bahamontes was ‘a fine gardener in her old age’. The last work of an ...”

“... It sulks under discoloured varnish, but its theatrics – the naive scholarliness of the shepherd tracing the inscription – are irresistible. Death is displaced in the painting to a figure in the foreground whom at first we barely notice: a typical Poussin figure, half-asleep on the ground, white-haired and a little overweight: as if death, if ...”

“... their way through the corn just over his left shoulder – and undisturbed, too, by an insomniac shepherd who pipes to his sheep in a nearby field of standing sheaves, sitting beneath a tree shaped like a lollipop. ‘The Valley Thick with Corn’ (1825). Altogether these might not sound like the ingredients of a very satisfactory work of art; but the ...”

“... was believed to be a descendant of Genghis Khan, but Tamburlaine makes him into a ‘Scythian shepherd’: as remote from ruling elites as a Canterbury shoemaker, but capable of defeating all the feudal despots who attempt to destroy him by virtù alone. Marlowe’s blank-verse Conan the Barbarian remakes himself into a conqueror of the world in the image ...”