“... is no coincidence that travel writers on Central Asia – a list that would include the Etonians Robert Byron and Colin Thubron, the Marlburian Bruce Chatwin and the gentry Scot William Dalrymple – so often boast superior educations if not pedigrees. Aspects of Stewart’s response to Iraq show the influence of his earlier travels. His interest in the ...”

“... to revise and correct the pages. When he was released, Wilde gave the manuscript to his friend Robert Ross, who had two copies made. He sent one to Lord Alfred Douglas; the other he later lodged in the British Museum. Sections from Ross’s copy were published in 1905 and in 1908. The complete version, based on the original manuscript, wasn’t published ...”

“... Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg 1933-1948, or fictional autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in ...”

“... Both phrases are perfectly clear, yet each is as far as possible from what the insufferable Robert Nye commends in the diction of Grigson: ‘how close that idiom comes to living speech’. Much virtue in that ‘living’! For Gurney, the life that there is in English speech has been injected into it by lonely, learned and masterfully artificial ...”

“... the petty detail of bourgeois democracy. In 1945, in a divided nation of ruins, hunger and mass graves, the Nazi empire and its claims on history seemed better forgotten. The postwar Bonn Republic, which lasted until reunification in 1990, brought material wealth and security, but never quite convinced those who still hoped for that ultimate, fulfilled ...”

“... became a byword for audience appeal and recognition. In The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl (c.1613-14), Robert Taylor speculates, ‘And if [this play] prove so happy as to please,/We’ll say ’tis fortunate, like Pericles’; and 25 years later Pericles was still immediately recognisable in James Shirley’s sledgehammer puns in Arcadia (1640): ‘Tire me? I am ...”

“... true to history. In Norfolk protesters muster at Wymondham, where their leader, the yeoman Robert Kett, decries illegal enclosures while declaring his loyalty to the Edwardian regime. ‘Christ’s blood, sir, we’ll open the Protector’s eyes to the true state of things,’ he promises Shardlake and his company, grimacing at their finery and soft ...”

“... with the new Post-Modern order: though he never fell into the historical pastiche of Michael Graves or Charles Moore, he did become more imagistic in his design. The great interest of this retrospective is to trace his passage from the early grunge work, through an elliptical Pop style, to the lavish ‘gestural aesthetic’ of the present. For ...”

“... full murder mode. Historical information and interpretation, based largely on Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews, have also been added. The 2503 photographs themselves: these have been reproduced from identity cards and gravestones, from formal studio portraits and intimate snapshots, from school, camp and playground groups, from ...”

“... Morris scholar John Drinkwater, as though to oppose it would be derisive of the common mood. Robert Byron, less precious than usual, regretted that ‘according to official and ecclesiastical standards … a bit of the old Roman wall is of more importance than Nash’s Regent Street, and one ruined pointed arch than all Wren’s churches put ...”

“... a little strange and moody’, to quote his sister again. In his early twenties he contracted Graves’ Disease, a horrific – though very rarely fatal – illness which causes sleeplessness, irritability, diarrhoea, muscular tremors, bug eyes and excessive sweating. His perverse reluctance to seek medical help aggravated his condition, and after a ...”

“... and his sexual fancy, the grotesque side of such things here given full play in sleep: soldiers, graves, and what should attend and commemorate them, which sound like flowers but are in fact cheap tobacco and cheap women. That reverence for the ‘lads of the Fifty-Third’, the Shropshire regiment, which appears in the first poem of A Shropshire ...”

“... are umpteen more, some lying about on the surface in mangled form and others buried in shallow graves. ‘Patience is mine: I will delay saith the Lord.’ ‘They are rolling up the maps all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ Some quotations I have lost track of. I thought I’d invented the phrase ‘snobbery with ...”

“... But the Afghan security forces Nato claims to have trained are a shell. The invaders are leaving graves behind but precious little else. The civil war will continue.The​ Ministry of Defence tried to prevent the publication of Akam’s book: the original publisher, Penguin Random House, pulled out before Scribe agreed to publish it. The military would ...”

“... to set the most famous gravediggers in world drama to work in close proximity to some real graves was clearly too good to miss. About four hundred of us were led through dark passages and down rusting stairs into this shadowy modern crypt by hooded figures carrying candles, and there among the broken floor tiles and rusting cables the principal ...”