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“... drive to Paris had been halted, it had not been pushed out of France, and the stalemate of trench-warfare had been reached. The means of ending the war were not obvious, and the cost in lives was already daunting. Prominent figures in Britain began to contemplate the possibility of operations elsewhere – either striking at Germany in a different ...”

“... in Stevenson’s account is his failure to deal adequately with the role of the medical services: trench fever, typhus, gas gangrene and many other, often fatal infections grew more common as the war went on, and must have worsened combat effectiveness and morale. It would have been interesting to have an estimate of which side dealt with this better. In the ...”

“... much ambiguity – she wanted to kill him, and not quickly.’ Miranda Seymour (no relation) and Richard Perceval Graves (the poet’s nephew) present Amy Graves in less hysterical terms, but agree that her rigid notions of purity helped inculcate Graves’s sexual difficulties. When on holiday with his family in Brussels in 1912, a young Irish girl staying ...”

“... between the US and UK to share codebreaking methods. In his history of the Five Eyes system, Richard Kerbaj goes back to 1938, when an MI5 officer decided to tip off the US embassy in London about a minor German plot to steal secrets from an American colonel in New York. After the culprit was arrested, another MI5 officer, Guy Liddell, travelled to the ...”

“... Library from the Ministry of Defence only in 1995. Even longer under cover was the map on which Richard Oswald, a friend of Benjamin Franklin and secretary to the British delegation which negotiated the Treaty of Paris in 1782, marked in red the proposed frontier between the United States and Canada. It was provided for the private use of his British ...”

“... Its effectiveness owes much, no doubt, to R. C. Sherriff’s screenplay, for his classic drama of trench warfare in the First World War, Journey’s End, had much the same strengths and limitations. The feature of The Dam Busters that grates most on the viewer in 1982 is that the hero’s pet dog is called ‘Nigger’ and that the name is adopted as the code ...”

“... Au contraire. It’s a murine horror show. A pit has to be excavated with a digger because a trench can’t contain all the corpses, barrowfuls of them every day.No less than the mice, the unnamed narrator is an intruder. She describes herself as an atheist, dismisses religious feeling as ‘neuroelectric misfire’ and feels nauseated by the ...”

“... constructed). An activist for the CND built type 1b – an A-frame made of scaffolding, set over a trench and covered with plywood, polythene, mattresses and earth, with a small pipe for ventilation – and lived in it for two weeks. Unsurprisingly, he was bored and uncomfortable. It was soon damp and mouldy; his skin was ‘wet all the time’; the smell of ...”

“... he called ‘Man of the 20th Century’. This grandiose scheme provides one of the sources of Richard Powers’s first novel. The title, Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance, refers to a photograph of young men in felt hats and starched collars walking along a country road, which Sander took in May 1914. Graham Swift is another novelist who, like ...”

“... in and around his life, and I mean it in the tradition of comedies like the final episode of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, which, after episode upon episode of darlings and foilings and cross-dressings, ends in 1917 with our not exactly heroes climbing out of their trench and running towards the ...”

“... then of the poets Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, and next a line of novelists headed by Richard Wright, began the task of reclamation about two generations earlier than the Caribbean writers who identified – if one can nowadays put it that way – with Europe, specifically England. Their literary industry, centred largely in London, only really ...”

“... air force: Germany and Russia each had as many as 250 craft. In the autumn of 1914, resting in a trench outside Antwerp, Rupert Brooke jotted down in his notebook that a ‘lovely glittering aeroplane’ had passed overhead. Around the same time, an anonymous French soldier saw an artillery-spotting German Taube puttering past. ‘There is that wretched bird ...”

“... Love’ deployed the traditional language of love poetry to communicate the intensity of trench warfare and the bonds of male affection it fostered (‘Red lips are not so red/As the stained stones kissed by the English dead’), Apollinaire seems to be evoking erotic fantasies as a means of escape and survival: his transformation of German artillery ...”

“... wheel, which opened in 1984. In the amusement arcade, girls of university age in high heels and trench coats eyed boys in tight jeans, who were trying a bit too hard. I suspect that this subsection of youth culture has been a feature of the city for a while. But the guides on my previous visits would never have had the confidence to expose a foreign ...”

“... very problematically in love with his best friend’s wife. I knew little about his artist son, Richard – C.R.W. Nevinson – apart from his First World War paintings and prints. They are easy to like: influenced by Cubism but totally comprehensible – a sort of Modernism-lite. I went to the Nevinson retrospective at the Imperial War Museum hoping for ...”