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For ever England

John Lucas, 16 June 1983

Sherston’s Progress 
by Siegfried Sassoon.
Faber, 150 pp., £2.25, March 1983, 9780571130337
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The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon 
by Rupert Hart-Davis.
Faber, 160 pp., £5.25, March 1983, 0 571 13010 0
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Siegfried Sassoon Diaries 1915-1918 
edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.
Faber, 288 pp., £10.50, March 1983, 0 571 11997 2
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... Yet, to his credit, Infantry Officer Sassoon had been entirely serious when he wrote his letter. Robert Graves and other friends understood that much, which was why they were so keen to get Sassoon certified as insane. If he was mad he could not be held responsible for his actions. So Macamble’s advice makes perfectly good sense. For Sherston to be proved ...

Love and Crime

Theodore Zeldin, 6 March 1980

Recollections and Reflections of a Country Policeman 
by W.C. May.
A.H. Stockwell (Ilfracombe), 342 pp., £6.60, July 1979, 0 7223 1199 0
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The Police in Society 
by Ben Whitaker.
Eyre Methuen, 351 pp., £6.95, March 1979, 9780413342003
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... Fiction from Godwin to Doyle, shows how much more the public hoped for from its police.2 Sir Robert Peel had insisted that a policeman should have neither ‘the rank, habits or station of a gentleman’. The English policeman has always had a lower than average level of education, and has generally been paid less than a skilled worker. You can hire a ...

Posterity

Frank Kermode, 2 April 1981

God’s Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age, 1890-1940 
by William Gerhardie, Michael Holroyd and Robert Skidelsky.
Hodder, 360 pp., £11.95, March 1981, 0 340 26340 7
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Futility 
by William Gerhardie.
Penguin, 184 pp., £1.75, February 1981, 0 14 000391 6
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... at this neglect. It would be agreeable to believe that the present stir of interest might alter the situation: but the rather freakish God’s Fifth Column, even supported by Futility, does not seem a strong enough base on which to rebuild a reputation. It may even reinforce the old view that Gerhardie was no more than a quite interesting and rather ...

Into Council Care

John Bayley, 6 July 1995

Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel 
by Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle.
Macmillan, 208 pp., £35, December 1994, 0 333 60760 0
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... which she joins young and old together by dramatising obsessive and almost psychotic continuities. Robert Kelway, the traitor hero from The Heat of the Day, who is giving away secrets to the enemy from his job at the War Office, is traced to his childhood in peculiarly prosperous and loveless suburban surroundings – or rather not traced, for Bowen is never ...

Effing the Ineffable

Glen Newey: Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century by Jonathan Glover, 25 November 1999

Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century 
by Jonathan Glover.
Cape, 469 pp., £18.99, October 1999, 0 224 05240 3
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... You can follow the same trail that led to a network ban in the US on the repeat showing of a Robert Fisk documentary criticising Israel. If enough powerful people – which means enough people with control over the major public communications in the US – make enough noise on behalf of victims in their team (more deserving of interest and concern than ...

Nicely Combed

Matthew Reynolds: Ungaretti, 4 December 2003

Selected Poems 
by Giuseppe Ungaretti, translated by Andrew Frisardi.
Carcanet, 287 pp., £14.95, April 2003, 1 85754 672 5
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... foglie And the French: nous sommes telle en automne sur l’arbre la feuille (Later editions alter the lineation of both versions and slightly adjust the French wording.) Frisardi balks at the challenge of this poem, but it has been well translated by Andrew Wylie as ‘Soldiers’: ‘Stand like/trees’/autumn/leaves’ (along with many other alert ...

I fret and fret

Adam Phillips: Edward Thomas, 5 November 2015

Edward Thomas: From Adelstrop to Arras 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 480 pp., £25, May 2015, 978 1 4081 8713 5
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... of a hidden part of him that was more real to him than much of what he did. Philip, his fictional alter ego in The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans, Thomas’s only novel, believes as an adolescent that ‘there was something at the back of my mind, not quite hidden from myself and my schoolfellows – a weight, a darkness – which was against intimacy.’ What Thomas ...

Diary

Rory Stewart: In Afghanistan, 11 July 2002

... the Pentagon was able to assert that ‘the people killed were Taliban/al-Qaida’; it was able to alter its objective from catching bin Laden to liberating Afghanistan; and in April it could announce its attempt to kill the commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who had been never been part of either al-Qaida or the Taliban. The second way of seeing the Taliban ...

Persons outside the Law

Catherine Hall: The Atlantic Family, 19 July 2018

Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 
by Daniel Livesay.
North Carolina, 448 pp., £45, January 2018, 978 1 4696 3443 2
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... find myself very much so for the Children,’ he wrote to his cousin. But this attachment didn’t alter his attitude to the Africans he bought and sold. He was a slave factor, his business was to sell people. The voyage of the Eliza, which set off in 1788 from Bristol to the Bight of Biafra, collecting its human cargo and then transporting it to Barbados and ...

Bye-bye, NY

Ange Mlinko: Harry Mathews’s Fever Dream, 18 March 2021

Collected Poems: 1946-2016 
by Harry Mathews.
Sand Paper Press, 288 pp., $28, February 2020, 978 0 9843312 8 4
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... in the coastal village of Deià in Mallorca. There they had their second child and they asked Robert Graves to name him – Philip. ‘The Relics’, which appeared in Mathews’s first collection, The Ring (1970), is a set of variations on imaginary landscapes in yellow and red, bringing to mind the Phrygian Midas, and a landscape turning to clanking ...

Philosophical Vinegar, Marvellous Salt

Malcolm Gaskill: Alchemical Pursuits, 15 July 2021

The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700 
by Jennifer M. Rampling.
Chicago, 408 pp., £28, December 2020, 978 0 226 71070 9
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... observable effects. The four elements possessed qualities that could be enhanced or suppressed to alter their basic nature. Significance was attached to sequences of colour change, above all the passage from black to the desired red but also movement through a spectrum of hues and shades, including the spectacular iridescence of the ‘peacock’s tail’.The ...

Heaven’s Waiting Room

Alex Harvey: When Powell met Pressburger, 20 March 2025

The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger 
edited by Nathalie Morris and Claire Smith.
BFI, 206 pp., £30, October 2023, 978 1 83871 917 3
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... by Roger Livesey, is a version of Powell. Theo, reserved and considered, represents an idealised alter ego of Pressburger, who gave him the eloquence and insight Clive lacks. Taken prisoner in England during the First World War, Theo returns at the outbreak of the next war to seek refuge. But he risks being held as an enemy alien (Pressburger himself had to ...

Before I Began

Christopher Tayler: Coetzee Makes a Leap, 4 June 2020

The Death of Jesus 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Harvill Secker, 208 pp., £18.99, January, 978 1 78730 211 2
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... discussions of Don Quixote, and the cryptic allusions to the gospels, there are faint echoes of Robert Walser, W.G. Sebald and others, and nods to Kleist’s essay ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, to Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and to the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti. ‘There is no such thing as a llave universal,’ Simón is told when he gets the Spanish ...

‘This in no wise omit’

Tom Bingham: Habeas Corpus, 7 October 2010

Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire 
by Paul Halliday.
Harvard, 502 pp., £29.95, March 2010, 978 0 674 04901 7
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... by this explanation and ordered that Lowe be bailed and later discharged. Similarly fortunate was Robert Fisher, who sold pins. So did the Pinners’ Company of London, which didn’t like Fisher selling pins improperly. So, in October 1637, he was committed to the custody of a royal messenger on the Pinners’ complaint. The company, in its return, recited ...

Eat Your Spinach

Tony Wood: Russia and the West, 2 March 2017

Return to Cold War 
by Robert Legvold.
Polity, 208 pp., £14.99, February 2016, 978 1 5095 0189 2
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Should We Fear Russia? 
by Dmitri Trenin.
Polity, 144 pp., £9.99, November 2016, 978 1 5095 1091 7
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Who Lost Russia? How the World Entered a New Cold War 
by Peter Conradi.
Oneworld, 384 pp., £18.99, February 2017, 978 1 78607 041 8
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... 1945 – the Cold War standing in this case as both analogy and warning. In Return to Cold War, Robert Legvold – a specialist in post-Soviet foreign policy and regular contributor to Foreign Affairs – sees worrying similarities between the current situation and the early stages of the Cold War (c.1948-53), focusing in particular on the rhetorical ...

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