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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... making game runs in the great reserves, and when they look at their driver – now their mentor, shepherd and guide – they see a black man and perhaps understand the symbolism of “sitting in the driver’s seat”.’ The regime of President Moi in Kenya has been detestable. It has involved massive corruption on the part of ministers and officials who ...”

“... of the City of London. In 1603, a quarter of a century after bricks began to be manufactured here, John Stow described its buildings as ‘filthy cottages’. Since then, the area, whether one calls it Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, Banglatown, has been a byword for poverty and violence. ‘A land of blood and beer,’ a rector of Hawksmoor’s ...”

“... said the waiter. ‘It’s a mistake.’ I reached the 1990s without mishap, though Miss Shepherd, the lady who lived for 15 years in a van in my drive, died at the end of April 1989, after which the undertaker rang up wondering if 9 May would be a suitable day for her funeral. ‘Why not?’ I said. I was only surprised that I hadn’t thought of it ...”

“... often depicted on pots. But until the 1952 decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, the ruling orthodoxy was that a hypothesised ‘Minoan’ was the (un-Greek) language of the palace culture of Crete and the Mycenaean settlements, so that the origins of the Iliad must come after that, not earlier than the start of the first ...”

“... had another connection to Jane Elgee before her marriage. In a letter to his son William in 1921, John Butler Yeats wrote of Jane Wilde: ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when the circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it.’ Butt enjoyed various romances, and was, on occasion, heckled at public meetings by the ...”