“... their lives. In his literary notebook, he copied out sentences from G.K. Chesterton’s book about Robert Browning, published in 1903. Chesterton had written about ‘the terrible importance of detail’ that apparently possessed Browning in an almost demonic way: Any room that he was sitting in glared at him with innumerable eyes & mouths gaping with a story ...”

“... that enabled him to ‘command tribute and hostages from them’ before skedaddling. Unlike Robert Graves, Suetonius doubts Claudius’ claim that under Caligula ‘he had deliberately pretended to be stupid’ as a cunning means of self-preservation. Graves goes too far in the other direction, glossing over ...”

“... Burnt Diaries (1999), and by Elaine Feinstein in her biography of Hughes from 2001. Like his hero Robert Graves, Hughes tirelessly pursued the White Goddess, or the Goddess of Complete Being as he called her in his study of Shakespeare, both in his imagination and in the forms that she assumed in the women whom he met and slept with. Few, it seems, took ...”

“... which are unable to address the original chaos he delights in. In the same way he tells Plath that Robert Graves has ‘a kind of disinfected enunciation, a crumb accent no less, states everything so far under that nothing at all is heard’.In these letters his love for Plath, for her ‘ponky warmth’, is absolute; in one letter he moves from ...”

“... evenings for more social recreation. Among those who wrote to Carpenter and sought him out were Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Forster, who became a close friend. By the time he made contact in 1913, Forster was already a well-known writer. He regarded Carpenter as ‘a saviour’. It is not hard to imagine how Merrill viewed all these adoring ...”

“... David Robert Jones, alias David Bowie, is now in his 40th year. His creepy, chilling phrases pop out of pub jukeboxes, and extracts from his movies catch the eye on pub videos, whether he is embracing a Chinese girl or being executed by Japanese soldiers; his image appears in the Sunday-paper magazines, artistically displayed in sundry poses ...”

“... status is, of course, more doubtful, even where a great composer is concerned. The Stravinsky/Robert Craft dialogues provide a case in point: can these unlikely confections, stilted essays in what one might call the comedy of conversational manners, really be taken seriously? In a sense, yes, they can. Their rhetoric – an arch, Nabokovian, dictionary ...”

“... starring as Rafe Ashton in his former wife Hilda Doolittle’s novel Bid Me to Live (1960), and as Robert Cunningham in D.H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod (1922), he may have had the misfortune to furnish the model for Sir Clifford Chatterley. Aldington’s maledictory novel, Death of a Hero, has not worn well. The parents of George, the ‘hero’, are parodic ...”

“... I heard his voice calling, ‘The sea! The sea!’ Hollowly into a shell As if he could contact Robert Louis Verne Or all the impossible, massed, forlorn spirits Edinburgh exiled, waving from twenty thousand leagues Under force eights the Lusitania, Hood, Tirpitz, Mary Rose lie barnacled, Cell-like binnacles of another life Lost to the world above but ...”

“... You cut rapidly from document to dream to memory to dialogue. Historical figures – Owen, Graves, Sassoon, the psychologist Rivers – mingle with invented ones like Prior, the working-class officer who is a kind of exemplary figure, with what one might call a palimpsest personality. The effect is of spread, not sequence. Nonetheless, revisiting the ...”

“... difference between the good and the bad is that the bad have to clamber awkwardly from their graves while the virtuous shoot out like space-rockets. Turner’s apocalyptic imagination concerns itself with the catastrophic end of all things: his ‘Angel Standing in the Sun’ emanates rays of fierce light that literally melt the evanescent human figures ...”

“... dead in the Second World War, are not prepared to take twenty thousand dead in Afghanistan? On the graves of Soviet troops who die in Afghanistan, the inscription is written: ‘They died for international duty.’ Down in Peshawar, the ivy crawls over the gravestones of the British troops killed by the Pathans a century ago. The British stayed for more than a ...”

“... a remittance man was an agreeable kind of life. I had no qualms about being kept. When I showed Robert Graves, who still lives in Majorca, one of those early novels, he was encouraging enough to say that he found it interesting, but added: ‘Since you come from Nottingham, why don’t you write a novel about that?’ I had already written stories set ...”

“... texts that (often explicitly) comment on themselves and on other texts. An early poem, ‘Plague Graves’, signals a debt to Hughes and speaks of litter being destroyed when                           Sheep maul beyond recognition alarmingly quickly the sandwich-paper memorials left by charabanc trippers, dissolving all tangible ...”

“... of saints And angels’ eyes …In a letter to F.S. Flint, Aldington records his discovery of the graves of some little French girls killed by a shell, adding that ‘I often go and stand by them & think many things.’ Enduring heavy gas-shelling and bombardment, he forced himself not just to notice but to note in verse the details of what he saw, presenting ...”