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“... absorb this salutary lesson? Bumptiously cultivating men of letters, he met and greatly irritated Siegfried Sassoon and Wilde’s friend Robert Ross. On Armistice Day he was to be seen in a tail-coat in a Rolls-Royce belonging to an epicene Chilean opium addict, a pretty example of feasting with panthers. Six years of dangerous living in the theatre were ...”

“... by the aftermath of the First World War, a generation that knew the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and had read All Quiet on the Western Front, was deeply pacifist in feeling. When that pacifism was faced by the rise of Hitler and the Spanish Civil War, it was put under great strain and, except for those who joined the Peace Pledge ...”

“... the odds, begun and sustained. Their shared liking for new writing did much to lighten the gloom. Siegfried Sassoon and T.E. Lawrence became valued friends. There were many literary callers – Edmund Blunden, E.M. Forster, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, John Drink water – and Florence took an eager interest in their ...”

“... of Allan, all much patronised by overwrought clergy. The Craiglockhart military hospital where Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were treated in World War One was once a hydro; fortunately, the high douche was never invoked for the shell-shocked. Disillusion with hydropathy accelerated the decline of the spa habit, though there were one or two late ...”

“... Confinement followed at one of the grim convalescent hospitals – little had changed since Siegfried Sassoon was sent up to Craiglockhart to revise his opinions – designed to get patients quickly back into the firing line. Maclaren-Ross developed an enduring sense of persecution and sending the Army up in his fiction was insufficient ...”

“... far greater experience than himself. Nevertheless the popular image remained that projected by Siegfried Sassoon and Oh what a lovely war: of a general who stubbornly year after year consigned scores of thousands of young soldiers to horrible deaths in pursuit of an insane strategy, using outmoded tactics under conditions he did not begin to ...”

“... the gardens might last long enough for flowers to bloom or vegetables to be harvested. The war, Siegfried Sassoon wrote, was ‘mainly a matter of holes and ditches’ and soldiers on both sides took the freshly upturned earth and wreckage as the substratum for a new landscape, however circumscribed and short-lived. A permanent garden was established ...”

“... no worse, either, than anyone else’s. Thus he attempts to play down Robert’s role in saving Siegfried Sassoon from a court-martial. He challenges my account. I sympathise with him: one of Robert’s many faults was his inability to minimise his part in anything which might appear creditable in the eyes of an enlightened posterity. Perhaps he was ...”

“... a new path. Or rather, there was one thing you could do with them, which is what Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon did – make poetry out of them. I think we need not trouble too much about Sassoon, whose war poems made their great and salutary impact at the time but now look a little diminished. Those ...”

“... at Charterhouse and, for the last four years, the derangements of army life. In 1916, he had taken Sassoon there so that they could both work on their anti-war poems, and had begun the first draft of what would become Goodbye to All That. With the war now finally over – though Graves would suffer the delayed effects of shellshock for the next decade – he ...”

“... and war psychologist William Rivers (whom Graves met at Craiglockhart hospital, when Siegfried Sassoon was also a patient there in the summer of 1917, and to whom he dedicated On English Poetry in 1922) had also inspired his interest in early matriarchal societies. The White Goddess reads as though, after taking all this in and shaking it up ...”

“... more than once that Hemingway proved to be a better writer about the war than Robert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon, even though they saw a lot more fighting than he did, precisely because he was not, as they were, hampered by a literary education and training in ‘conventional strategies of expression’. A similar point is made about the jazz musician ...”

“... brother Basil Seal: ‘She thought of him in terms of the war books she had read. She saw him as Siegfried Sassoon, an infantry subaltern in a mud-bogged trench, standing to at dawn, his eyes on his wrist watch, waiting for zero hour ... ’ Hers is a familiar mutation of the truism that generals are always preparing for the war they’ve just ...”

“... so careless, That, should you drop to a doze, Wind’s fumble or men’s feet Are in your face. Siegfried Sassoon wrote about the ‘sculptural’ quality of Rosenberg’s poetry. The pieces of paper on which the poems are written are full of doodled drawings of human figures. It is the bulk of these featureless figures that is striking, the way they ...”

“... literary ones; I took vicarious pride in knowing that it had been the regiment of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and David Jones. They had no successors in my time. In Jamaica the officers lived a cheerfully philistine life, playing polo, attending cocktail parties and spending weekends on the beaches of the north coast. The other ranks took their ...”