“... 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 ...”

“... has a subheading: ‘Durrance hears news of Faversham’; ‘The House of Stone’; ‘Colonel Trench assumes a knowledge of Christianity’. The branding scene that terrified me the most aged five doesn’t occur at all, nor in the book does Faversham shepherd the blind Durrance across the desert to safety. Predictably the film ends more spectacularly ...”

“... it you can see flashes of the guns as they send out their messages of death and destruction. The trench line is visible too, surrounded by thousands of shell holes, filled with water from the last rains. It is a dismal sight, barren and desolate. The sky would soon be crowded with aircraft, usually with red, white and blue roundels rather than black ...”

“... well​ did Willie and Oscar know each other anyway? In the two massive Lives of Wilde, by Richard Ellmann and Matthew Sturgis, Hornung’s name is not mentioned once. Nor is there a single letter to or from Hornung in the equally massive Complete Letters, edited by Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, and Rupert Hart-Davis. Rowland has a whole chapter ...”

“... Grip, a Daimler 105 hp tractor engine and an armoured body, weighing 18 tons, and able to cross a trench 4 feet wide. Swinton persuaded Lloyd George to call an Interdepartmental Conference on 28 August and the following day d’Eyncourt wrote to Stern that the meeting had ‘distinctly cleared the air and put the whole thing on a sounder footing. I’m glad ...”

“... of position’ was what Gramsci called the work of the modern revolutionary party: trench warfare as opposed to charging at the enemy, and yet a total war that might drag on for years and years. The revolutionary could be imagined as a guerrilla crawling through the ‘fortifications’ of civil society, searching for ideological weak spots ...”

“... its time, the book has had its admirers – my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer to stand up for Laura Riding.) But mostly, the sort of people who get their opinions published have lashed it ...”

“... of Britain’s neo-Soviet past pretend they knew how to run a business. What gets lost in this trench warfare between positions is that in terms of running a railway, this wasn’t a bad time. Under the reign of its boss from 1983 to 1990, Bob Reid (who was succeeded, confusingly, by a completely different Bob Reid), parts of British Rail broke ...”

“... Georgia. Ignorant in those distant days about booby-traps, I wandered into a deserted hut with a trench, perhaps a foot deep, dug under a rickety bamboo bed. A rifle pit? Hardly, given its position – more likely a simple bomb shelter for the owner and his family. On the beaten earth floor was a sickle for harvesting rice, its handle work-polished and ...”

“... Artillery. He was in France and Flanders for four years, and was then invalided out suffering from trench feet.Enlisting in the Army may have had a special significance for him in that it related to an element in his heritage of which he was as proud as he was of its rabbinical component: a recent forebear, he often told me, had been an officer in the Russian ...”