Search Results

“... poems; only Yeats and Hardy had significantly more. True, Larkin’s anthology was denounced by Donald Davie and others as a counterblast against Modernism. But it can’t be denied that Sassoon’s war poems share with Kipling’s the quality of being conspicuously memorable: the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations includes a dozen of them, mostly in ...”

“... no sustained narratives of disease. Autobiographies in the shadow of death were rare and brief. In David Hume’s six-page-long account of his life there are four sentences about his impending end: ‘I was struck with a disorder in my bowels which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a ...”

“... coastguard off Havana, the most consequential ear in history before those of Vincent van Gogh and Donald Trump. The British reaction had been tepid at first, and the country seemed to be basking in the long peace of which Robert Walpole boasted to the queen in 1734: ‘Madam, there are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe, and not one ...”