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Sheppard, John

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A Spiritual Affinity

John Sheppard on the letters of Raymond Chandler

I don’t know about you, but I have a number of books on the go at any one time. There’s one in the downstairs loo, one in the bathroom, a couple by my armchair in the living-room, and two or three by the bed. But one book has been permanently by my bed since my wife gave it me for Christmas in 2000, and I turn to it more or less every night for the crisp good sense which is guaranteed wherever I open it, and perhaps a laugh as well.
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Aunty May’s Footsteps

John Sheppard on Robert Bridges (ed.), The Spirit of Man

My Aunty May was one of that legion of women constrained to spinsterhood by the slaughter of the First World War. She devoted herself to good works, commanding half of Kent for the St John Ambulance Brigade, and being a lifelong carer of old folk. Her private consolation was reading, and her book collection, which never ceased to grow, ran riot through every room of her various successive small houses in Hythe. One of her strong suits was poetry, and she was a disciplined reader, noting in the margins every occasion on which she consulted a particular passage. She read through Robert Bridges’ anthology The Spirit of Man ten times, taking one quotation a day, from 1942 (when she received a copy of the 23rd impression as a Christmas present) to 1973. Her last notation, on 16 January 1973, was two-thirds of the way through her eleventh trawl, at a quotation from Paradise Lost . . .

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