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“... see the tracer, they seldom know when they are under fire. One pilot suggested that for an Iraqi farmer on the ground ‘it must be difficult to resist the temptation to shoot at us, like duck hunting.’ A few minutes later, evidently thinking that his remarks might be considered flippant, he asked urgently that it not be attributed to him. These days, the ...”

“... when Percy was the most successful tragedy of the time, and her closest friends were the actor David Garrick and his wife, Eva, was the cause of some dismay to sober-minded Evangelicals. But Roberts had an answer to that. He was not offering ‘a perfect specimen of Christianity’, but an account of a heroic triumph: More had mixed with the society ...”

“... of technology by the tail and could not let go: there is no way back to a state of nature. The farmer is constantly resisting nature’s tendency to entropy, and the products of the worked land are not nature’s bounty but the result of unremitting human pressure, regularly characterised in the Georgics as violence. The poem’s first simile, two hundred ...”

“... light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had broken at long last and this was the first male role I was ...”

“... way he stood, the way he looked at the canvas, the way he worked it, always made me think of a farmer.’ For Pollock the identification was precise. He spoke of memories that would come to him as he worked of standing by his father and watching him pissing on a flat rock. Pissing features a good deal in these pages. It was often the coda to an evening, in ...”

“... 11 January. It’s not to disparage David Bowie, but if even a fraction of the tributes being paid to him and his influence were true we would never have had a Conservative government or indeed any government at all. Hearing the news on the Today programme this morning R. nearly cries. I met Bowie only once, at John Schlesinger’s sometime in the 1980s, and remember him as a slight, almost colourless figure, who was somehow Scots ...”

“... he reckoned that out of 1.3 million families, no fewer than a quarter had as their head a tenant farmer, a freeholder or a landowning nobleman – all of them possessors of land rights. Minerva’s owl was soon planing over the new landscape and trying to make sense of this ‘possessive individualism’, as C.B. Macpherson was to dub it three centuries ...”

“... could be measured. He came from a family of Bible readers. Linda was the daughter of a tobacco farmer who in the 1920s sold his plot, put his money in the stock market expecting to live off the returns, and moved to the small town of Shillington, Pennsylvania. He was ruined by the crash of 1929. By the time of his grandson’s birth in 1932 the last of his ...”

“... the story of the progressively efficient use of resources: man ascended from hunter to shepherd to farmer, before realising his true potential as the self-interested merchant of commercial society. Today’s narratives flatter the aspiring coders and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley. For Yuval Noah Harari, the ‘march of civilisation’ has always been ...”

“... to say. As it is, relief must be taken where it is found: in the nursery rhyme ‘This is the farmer sowing his corn,’ quoted to demonstrate the ‘less stringent constraints on multiple right-embedded clauses’, or the contrived example taken from a 2005 paper on syntax, ‘Who plays what instrument? Katie the Kazoo, and Robin the Rebec.’ (I cannot ...”

“... except their labour. In their 1979 case study of Terling, a village in Essex, Keith Wrightson and David Levine described a massive upward redistribution of wealth between 1525 and 1700, and descriptions of early modern society since theirs have been full of people like Edward Ballard, a ‘pore needy felloe’ with ‘noe certen place of aboad’ living apart ...”

“... it was a sign’, and during a flashback to the day itself, when her father tells a passing farmer what has happened and he replies: ‘God works in mysterious ways.’ Later, Cass experiences a sense of ‘wrongness buzzing within her like a bee trapped in a veil’. At another point, she describes feeling as if ‘a whole swarm of bees’ were trapped ...”

“... the NFU lobbied hard to raise the cap – this year it’s 21,500. The average age of the British farmer is higher by about 20 years – some put it at 58 – than that of the worker in the Square Mile. Farming is no longer a career in demand. Tax relief for farm properties has led to the rise of speculation in farmland, while tenant farming has fallen ...”

“... Mythology of the Secret Societies (1972) illuminated much, but not the movement’s origins. Now David Stevenson can claim to have clarified these considerably, in a work of creative scholarship flavoured by exceptional candour and gusto. His subtitle gives his gist. In the 17th century, such characteristic features of Freemasonry as the local Lodge ...”

“... British counterparts, which could look to the latter much like indolence. Life as a small tenant farmer involved sporadic bursts of labour but a fair bit of leisure, too, and the Irish were fond of their fairs and feast-days. You could turn the muscles involved in planting potatoes to digging canals, but there seemed no point in overdoing it. How well you ...”