“... and malodorous fog that made it harder for German gunners to find their targets.As Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and other memoirists of the First World War made clear, there was always a radical division between ‘the line’ and ‘behind the line’. The line meant mud, blood, rats, inedible rations and the continuous, unbearable thunder of ...”

“... there was less for the people who designed those buildings and who would seek refuge in Britain. Siegfried Sassoon abhorred the organised social lie of Blomfield’s Menin Gate at Ypres:‘Their name liveth for ever’ the Gateway claimsWas ever an immolation so beliedAs these intolerably nameless names?Well might the Dead who struggled in the slimeRise ...”

“... a contemporary of Goethe, who started off dealing antiquities in the Frankfurt ghetto; David Sassoon (1792-1864), heir to a distinguished Baghdadi-Jewish dynasty, who fled the political machinations of his hometown for British India; Joseph Evzel Gunzburg (1812-78), an alcohol magnate from Podolia with a prestigious rabbinic genealogy stretching back ...”

“... Victoria left him. Schwartz made plans to travel to England – he was sure that T.S. Eliot and Siegfried Sassoon had some vital information about a million dollars that was owed to him – and Dike had him sectioned. At Twin Elms Hospital, a sanatorium near the Syracuse campus, he made little progress. ‘Suppose psychosis clarifies things?’ he ...”

“... his older and his younger selves. The sheer incommunicability of actual warfare kept him silent. Siegfried Sassoon was eloquent about his time on leave in England and how it made him boil with anger. The Channel may be barely twenty miles across at its narrowest point, but the gulf between the meaning of war to a soldier in the trenches and the meaning ...”

“... Hauptmann and the French composer George Antheil; others such as Max Beerbohm, Richard Aldington, Siegfried Sassoon and Basil Bunting passed through. In Rapallo Yeats recovered and relapsed and needed constant care. ‘Never was his dependence on George greater, or more pathetic,’ Maddox writes. ‘When told he needed a night nurse so that his wife ...”

“... employer. Other forms were kept for different reasons. In Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), Siegfried Sassoon’s alter ego, George Sherston, recalls being transported on a hospital barge down the Seine: ‘A label was attached to me; I have kept that label, and it is in my left hand as I write these words. It is marked Army Form W. 3083.’ ...”

“... In my twenties, as a literature student, I read and acquired the obvious classics: Graves, Owen, Sassoon, Remarque, Barbusse, Brittain, Fussell. But I had lots of other fads and hobbies going too: opera, Baroque painting, Kurosawa films, the Titanic, the Romanovs, trashy lesbian novels. Sometimes my preoccupations overlapped: I became fascinated, for ...”