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“... under orders. My Wehrmacht captors invariably panicked. One evening, just after I had dug my slit trench, word came that a nearby German major would be pleased to give dinner to a British officer in captivity. My host, with one eye, one arm, the Iron Cross with oakleaves, talked in a strained voice of the epic experience of war. Were we British, he wanted to ...”

“... of fury. On one occasion he was roused to a paroxysm of rage by a corpse that he found in a trench wearing a cap rather than a helmet. It was pointed out to the General that the miscreant was dead; this plea in mitigation was found unacceptable. Suddenly in 1917, Allenby fell foul of Haig after expressing the mildest possible dissent from the strategy ...”

“... Tietjens. Christopher Tietjens, as a result of his love for Valentine Wannop and his experience of trench warfare, is prised out of his class prejudices. Such a humanist and sentimental theme would not have been admissible in a ‘French-style’ novel, and we are to see in Ford’s own war experience one of the factors which called forth his new ...”

“... to Farringdon. The line was built by the cut-and-cover method, which involved digging a large trench down the middle of the Euston and Pentonville Roads. Ingenious arrangements had been made to capture the exhaust steam generated by the tank engines, but not the dense, sulphurous smoke billowing infernally from their funnels. The Metropolitan opened for ...”

“... a jack-knife (‘Tubby thanked me a thousand times’). Then there is the splendid book edited by Richard van Emden and Stephen Chambers, which consists mainly of soldiers’ and sailors’ letters and diaries, British, Anzac and Turkish – no French or Indian, apart from a couple of Indian officers in the British army – arranged chronologically, with an ...”

“... autumn I bought, at Deighton Bell in Trinity Street, a copy of George III and the Politicians by Richard Pares, a book I have still, my name written in it by a friend, as I disliked my handwriting then as I do now. It was a detailed, allusive book, demanding a more thorough knowledge of 18th-century politics than a schoolboy could be expected to have, but I ...”

“... a prominent feature of the university world. Without the overwhelming skill of Claus Moser and Richard Layard in statistical analysis and presentation the old guard might have died slowly and hard. Although the Robbins Committee must be absolved from causing all subsequent disasters, their misfortunes and mistakes cannot be accounted small. In the first ...”

“... that one would not be able to observe were one to be wearing the traditional investigative garb of trench coat and Fedora.’ The humour lies in the pedantry and literalism. And in the assertion of rapidity, when – mental activity aside – everything in Okotie’s fiction happens in slow motion. Researchers have calculated that the average person has 48.6 ...”

“... London using his lieutenant’s uniform to pick up women. Others might write of the horrors of trench warfare but Wheatley was inspired to write a romantic novel, Julie’s Lovers, which was rejected by Cassell. More important so far as his literary development is concerned was his meeting in 1917 with Eric Gordon Tombe, of whom he wrote: ‘In mental ...”

“... and found evidence not just of bubonic plague but of typhus, typhoid fever, smallpox, louse-borne trench fever and relapsing fever. Incubation periods vary between different infectious diseases to such a degree that it’s only within the last century or two that we’ve been able to establish cause and effect in the pathogenesis of infection. In the Middle ...”

“... and so never lived to know what I have known – the Beatles, black power, the Administration of Richard Nixon – all this has taken place in a trivial after-time and has nothing to do with anything that really mattered, with summer and someone hardly remembered, a youth so abruptly translated from vivid, well-loved (if briefly) flesh to a few scraps of ...”

“... brought back from Patagonia – quite differently from the young Coleridgean anatomist Richard Owen. This divergent ‘reading’ reflected not only his distinct style of science – he was a field naturalist and Owen a museum anatomist – but also his evolutionary understanding (on which he was implacably opposed by the romantic ...”

“... controls that voice? What does it echo, in the long history of warfare examined by John Keegan and Richard Holmes in their book-of-the-television-series, Soldiers? It looks to me as if fighting men have adhered to perhaps half a dozen different codes. There is the ‘rape and pillage’ style: a gang of men sets off to plunder a wealthy place, seize ...”

“... of the Baroness Dunn. Henry (‘Taipan’) Keswick and the now ex-ministerial but ever-amusing Richard Needham are fellow-guests. A heated disagreement between them about Chris Patten’s governorship of Hong Kong flares up and amicably subsides. Entirely by chance, we meet the Pattens in London the very next evening for the first time since long before ...”

“... and then another. By the mid to late 1980s, it was possible to stand in an Eritrean frontline trench and watch with the naked eye as Ethiopian conscripts in the opposing trench, separated by a gully, brewed up water or warmed up gruel. The Eritreans were living like mountain goats in baking rockscape miles from their ...”