“... to be my last prose piece. All sorts of considerations make me believe it’s high time this shepherd boy stopped writing and sending off prose pieces and retired from a pursuit apparently beyond his abilities. I’ll gladly look about for another line of work that will let me break my bread in peace.’ Walser found further retreats and retirements. He ...”

“... His coffin was first removed to the garrison church, where thousands of people – including Dr John Buckley, the bishop of Cork and Ross – filed past to pay their respects. The funeral echoed the reinterment of Roger Casement – thrown in a lime pit in Pentonville Prison in 1916 and repatriated in 1965 – when Eamon de Valera got out of his sickbed to ...”

“... though I’d have thought the chances of him persuading his mamma to come are pretty slim. John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony ...”

“... Gathering, in Amherst, Massachusetts, he denounced the radical groups Earth First! and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, whose members had attacked and sunk two Icelandic whaling ships a year earlier. Deep ecologists, as the militants called themselves, believed as Bookchin did that only fundamental change would prevent the earth’s ruin, but he ...”

“... In 1993 John McGahern wrote an essay called ‘The Church and Its Spire’, in which he considered his own relationship to the Catholic Church. He made no mention of the fact that he had, in the mid-1960s, been fired from his job as a teacher on the instructions of the Catholic archbishop of Dublin because he had written a novel banned by the Irish Censorship Board (The Dark), and because he had been married in a register office ...”

“... of dew’ (‘A Creation’); there is brimming, gleaming, wonder, goldenness, ‘crisp-limbed shepherd boys’ and ‘honey-sweet sheep bells’ (‘Once in Arcady’), even, in ‘A Rune for Anthony John’, ‘Poecil carpets’. In ‘Sanctuary’, the narrator commands of the flowers, ‘Lie so. Be beautiful’, and ...”

“... it derives somewhat from Yeats and from Eliot, and in this country friends of mine, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. And a rather strange position was built up. There were great arguments that poetry was a form of knowledge, at least as valid as scientific knowledge, and in certain ways more so, because it didn’t abstract from experience. We claimed any ...”

“... of a number of recent books by Andreas Malm, opens by quoting an observation made in the LRB by John Lanchester (22 March 2007) that terrorism had thus far been markedly absent from the climate movement.* That might have been a sign of the times. There was little appetite in the years after 2001 for discussion of the merits of terrorism. Even if the ...”

“... not their shape. These serviceable homemade brogues could translate a labourer into a nymph, a shepherd into a dweller in Arcadia; they were brimming over with the spirit of Romanticism, passion for the elsewheres and the beyonds, for heath and moorland, cliff and crag, cataract and glade, for long drifting walks through the night, as when Dorothy ...”

“... view. And yet, for the next fifty years there were few reports on these seemingly uncharted lands. John Gunther’s bestselling 1949 memoir, Death Be Not Proud, about the death from cancer of his brilliant 17-year-old son, is a notable exception. Then, by the end of the 20th century, book-length accounts of illness were suddenly everywhere: more than thirty ...”

“... with becoming a plumber or hairdresser or sushi chef. It would support a view of authorship like John Gregory Dunne’s, who described writing for a living as ‘a job, like laying pipe’.Imitating Authors describes two developments over the past three centuries that helped imitation lose its old sense and take a pejorative turn. The first is the ...”

“... in those picture-riddles where a sheep’s fleece, insidiously drawn, contains the silhouette of a shepherd. Nowhere does the quest for the hidden author lead along more convoluted paths than in the case of Fritz Fischer. In a suite of studies published between 1961 and 1979, Fischer argued first that Germany had uniquely aggressive war aims in 1914, and ...”

“... ESCAPE, GAS RELATED EMERGENCY, ELLIS & EVERARD CHEMICALS. There are pictures of ferocious German shepherd wolf-dogs, red cone roads, and a vista of churned slurry (future parkland). In a few short months, just imagine, all this will be leafy avenues, multi-choice entertainment complexes and eco-friendly superstores. Sainsbury’s are already excavating the ...”

“... religious belief seriously enough to write a ‘Neo-Thomist Poem’, which reads: The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want him for long.The following year he and Pauline Pfeiffer, whose family had a private chapel in their house, were married in a Catholic church. Archibald MacLeish and his wife, Ada, declined to attend because, as Ada wrote, she ‘was ...”

“... escapades or of other people’s bad behaviour, a favourite being how, after a performance in John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me at Chichester for which he had been much praised, Alan was sitting in his dressing-room when there was a tentative knock on the door. It was Alec Guinness. He shook Alan’s hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and ...”