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“... generals are said to have been horrified when Sargent opened Thayer’s valise. According to Richard Murray of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the prototype garment resembled an old hunting jacket, trailing strips of coloured cloth and daubed with patches of colour that reflected Thayer’s interest in harlequin costumes. It’s not clear whether ...”

“... they thought to displace. Interest in the English 1890s has naturally been growing of late. Richard Ellmann’s biography looked forward, emphasising the importance of Wilde as the martyred prophet of a new dispensation. Others have preferred to look back, finding in the poetry of the period a dilute version of the Symbolism of the Eighties. But John ...”

“... who inherited the Shakespearean gifts of his parents, at the age of 11 learning the whole of Richard II by heart in six weeks? Or with Vanessa, the best actor of them all, whom her father called ‘divinely mad’ with a conscience the ‘size of Grand Central Station’? Of these two books on the family Spoto’s is by far the more serious and ...”

“... He had said that he ‘used to live in the Paradise Valley in Montana with my literary friends Richard Ford and Thomas McGuane’. Some weeks later, I met Richard Ford at a wedding, and I asked him about Harris. Ford squinted and said: ‘Don Harris . . . Don Harris . . .’ Then he raised his hands and ...”

“... life. In 1940 his unit fled before the advancing Germans to Neufchâtel, where they dug a trench to shelter from attack and turned up the skull of a First World War soldier. Macleod immediately imagined the dead addressing him: ye are here, ye men of war, digging trenches – digging graves dying where we died before. He spent much of the rest of ...”

“... eggs from ‘the egg man’ and the like) but rural and local words: ‘A “groop” [was] a sunk trench in the concrete floor … to drain the piss and catch the cow dung. Cleaning the byre involved barrowing out the contents of the groop, sluicing it down and rebedding it with clean straw.’ Readers younger than Heaney, especially outside Ireland, may ...”

“... France just in time for the Battle of the Somme. After five months in the trenches he contracted trench fever and was sent back to England. Lewis arrived in France in late 1917 and served until he was wounded by friendly fire at the Battle of Arras five months later. Warnie also served in France; Dyson was wounded at Passchendaele. Their experiences, instead ...”

“... to bring countries together than any number of EU directives.’ He quotes another political hero, Richard Cobden, the Manchester textile manufacturer and Anti-Corn Law Leaguer, who described free trade as ‘God’s diplomacy’, not bothering to notice that in the case of the redundant cotton weavers of Bengal, the casualties of cheap Lancashire cloth, God ...”

“... pigs and cows, all the nursery favourites, were being taken out by snipers and bulldozed into a trench on a Cumbrian airfield, it was gratifying to learn that the threatened musk-beetle is thriving and multiplying in the Lea Valley wetlands. Twenty-one species of dragonfly on a good day. The regional park is a safe haven for grass snake and common toad. The ...”

“... were didactic – ‘one of the things they were about was the indisposability of plastic.’ Richard Deacon, who is with Cragg ‘the most expensive, the most written about, the best patronised ... of the new British sculptural establishment’, makes startling hybrids: ‘To produce one of his small sculptures an old brass navigational aid must have ...”

“... visit her in Cornwall, where she was living with Cecil Gray, a musicologist, while her husband, Richard Aldington, was serving on the Western Front. H.D. thought the writer was an elderly schoolmistress: she got a surprise when the 24-year-old millionaire’s daughter turned up. Souhami compares their meeting to the moment when Beach’s hat flew off in the ...”

“... by romantics – ‘poets, or they wouldn’t have run us into such idiocy’, according to Cesca Trench, an early radical who was appalled when the actual fighting started – and was defeated by a regular army, but the War of Independence that broke out in January 1919 was fought by an altogether different breed, on both sides. In 1919 Churchill, then ...”

“... comma counts, in that description); he, too, likes nothing better, while taking tea with Dr Richard Garnett, Principal Librarian at the British Museum, than brutally to crush the aspirations of any young person available for the purpose. Like Virginia Woolf, Ford asks where these abrupt and inexplicable furies came from. As Ford grew older, the beards ...”

“... there is a similarity in terms of bravado, shared relish, the turned-around humour of the trench. This is why, in the case of both poets, ‘serious’ attention to their social and personal attitudes is beside the point. In the cases of Edward Thomas and Hardy there is often an embryonic trace of the short story, something much more developed in some ...”

“... World War. Moore cites an eye-witness who described him ‘avoiding a shell, defending a shallow trench … tearing the clothes which covered him and were now becoming rags and tatters’. Then, ‘one last spasm shook his body which seems riddled with bullets.’ As an encore Nijinsky stood facing the wall and made some strange movements like a ‘mad ...”