“... Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), an Armenian shepherd confesses to being in love with his sheep, Daisy: ‘It was the greatest lay I ever had!’ In Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2000), the same premise plays out as family tragedy. The disclosure of the father’s goat-love – ‘a love of ...”

“... and woman-power. The nominal founder of the Fabian Society was the illegitimate son of a Scottish shepherd, a man with the gift of tongues and very hot on immortality. He had blazed his way through London in the early 1880s, inflaming a miscellaneous band of idealists and agitators who in his wake formed a sort of club where they read papers to one another ...”

“... were supposed to have hunted down and murdered Merlin in these woods; the valley was home to Michael Scott, a wizard who appears in Dante’s Inferno. The area was in unruly border country, and it is also on the spine of Scotland, where the waters divide to flow west or east. James Laidlaw’s grandfather Will O’Phaup followed fairies one evening into ...”

“... back to the subject, he began with a small oil sketch based on the sketchbook drawing but adding a shepherd and his flock. The next development was a pen-and-ink drawing in which he articulated the shape of the definitive image: he brought the two towers closer to each other and put a small tree between them, and, with the help of another of the memoranda in ...”

“... humans’ kindness to them: in her first novel, Under the Net (1954), a retired film star German shepherd remains infinitely obliging despite enduring the indignity of being sold and then dognapped; in The Nice and the Good (1968) a ‘somewhat poodle-like dog’ warms a pair of characters trapped in a cave. She writes brilliantly and with real sympathy ...”

“... poor-but-honest populace. (Rather as Marie-Antoinette liked turning her thoughts to ‘simple’ shepherd life.) But the ‘King and Collector’ of the exhibition title is perhaps best read as a prince who developed a taste for oils on canvas while visiting the Spanish Habsburg court in a failed bid to secure a wife and who, once crowned in 1625, had the ...”

“... boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space ...”

“... His determination to see nature as benign has been called a flaw by his most intelligent critic, Michael Cohen, in The Pathless Way. As we climbed together on a route called Great White Book in the Tuolumne domes east of Yosemite, he told me how Muir was disconcerted by the writhen and stunted junipers rooting in crevices of the granite because they were ...”

“... Apollo in Picardy, the old Prior sinks into senility (‘Deliquio animi’), after the Dionysian shepherd boy has committed his moonlight murder. Humphrey Morrison has engineered it so that Dolke breaks away from the influence of Von Fluorn, but takes upon himself the responsibility of both masque and anti-masque – and eventually secures an unqualified ...”

“... Edward Crankshaw and C.A. Lejeune, a socially and intellectually glamorous world, particularly to Michael Frayn, one of a group of us who went to the exhibition. But, of course, London itself was beginning to seem glamorous then – the Coffee House in Northumberland Avenue, the Soup Kitchen in Chandos Place, films at the Academy on Oxford Street and suppers ...”

“... to the barbarous clangour of a gong’, it was already the case in ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ of 1889 that there weremany changing thingsIn dreary dancing past us whirled,To the cracked tune that Chronos sings.But Yeats was surely also a poet of will, and of an identifiable cluster of themes; and since it seems implausible anyway to claim a ...”

“... the on-ding like a lantern. Under his guava-pink balaclava he looks like Punch – like an Andean shepherd steering his flock through a clouded pass – like the Pied Piper playing us into the hillside: contradictory symbols have begun to form. Commitment time. From now on each perch will be precarious, spreadeagled; retreat from the razor-edge no easier than ...”

“... tradition insists that the inn was slated, and it was burnt down before becoming a [thatched] shepherd’s cottage.’ Five households in 1841, including a publican; two in 1851, including a widowed shopkeeper; one in 1881, a shepherd incomer; abandoned by 1900. A mixture of forced clearance and demographic drift. As a ...”

“... other writers.’ As Gelpi rightly points out, Day Lewis did always have his defenders. Early on, Michael Roberts claimed that From Feathers to Iron (1931) was ‘a landmark, in the sense in which Leaves of Grass, A Shropshire Lad, Des Imagistes and The Waste Land were landmarks’. And on the occasion of his death, Kingsley Amis declared that Day ...”

“... of a ‘national crisis’. On 1 April 1996, the Monday of Easter week, the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, made a surprise statement full of foreboding about imminent IRA violence and the need for immediate legislation to prevent it. Various lacunae in the law had been discovered which it was now suddenly deemed essential to fill. Naturally, having ...”