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“... R. is very anxious about the Czar and “much upset”.’ Five days later, Haggard attends in St Paul’s the ‘solemn service to Almighty God on the occasion of the entry of the United States of America into the Great War for Freedom’. George R. was of course present, and now Haggard writes: ‘I do not think that ever before I realised how small the ...”

“... Paul Fussell’s 34 essays were written in different moods and time-zones for different British and American journals, between 1967 and 1982. Some are boyishly truculent, politically partisan, denouncing wrong-headed fellow Americans (so that the British reviewer whistles between his teeth, thinking: ‘They can’t be as bad as all that ...”

“... In a 1982 essay called ‘My War’ Paul Fussell described how – at the age of 20 – he became a full-time ironist: one who, by means of his experience in combat, had learned to perceive ‘some great gulf, half-comic and half-tragic, between what one expects and what one finds’. And in his book The Great War and Modern Memory, the soldier poets and memoirists who featured most prominently were those who had found themselves stranded in that same ‘great gulf’, learning firsthand how wrong they had been in their imaginings of what awaited them in France ...”

“... Paul Fussell’s aim in this book, he tells us in a preface, is ‘to suggest what it felt like to be young and clever and literate in the final age of travel’. Or, more precisely, what it thus felt like in Great Britain. ‘Because the most sophisticated travel books of the age are British, I have focused largely on them ...”

“... I am assuming,’ Paul Fussell said in Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980), ‘that travel is now impossible and that tourism is all we have left.’ To be a traveller, you have to move about alone, eschew standard procedures, avoid the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure ...”

“... but for the death of Romantic landscape-painting. That is exactly the thought, or fiction, that Paul Nash’s The Menin Road is meant to suggest. But one needs, obviously, to be careful not to misread this as some T.E. Hulme-like rejection of Romantic landscape-painting as a humanist deviation; it could hardly be so, seeing that Nash went on to be one of ...”

“... so ill-founded as the blatant hypocrisy and frantic status-seeking gleefully recorded by Professor Fussell and his precursors may make it appear. For it rests on an underlying assumption that Americans treat each other as if they were all, whatever the other differences between them, of common social origin. None of them seriously believes that they are, any ...”

“... It was stamped deeply upon ‘modern memory’ – not just in literary culture as described by Paul Fussell, but in family and communal memories and in the most solemn national commemorations. Consequently the Great War is unusual in being a matter of both intensive academic study and considerable popular interest. More readily than on many other ...”

“... pudding and the smack of leather against willow. Writers use pastoral when times are hard. As Paul Fussell points out in his Great War and Modern Memory, it is ‘a way of invoking a code to hint by antithesis at the indescribable ... at the same time, it is a comfort in itself, like rum, a deep dug-out, or a woolly vest.’ With Mr Whitelaw, it is ...”

“... felt able to trust only information recorded at the time and on the spot), against the intemperate Paul Fussell, and against Angus Calder’s classics The People’s War and The Myth of the Blitz. She protests against the assumption that the myths – calm, confidence, cheeriness, the breaking down of barriers, the ready hand of friendship – ‘were ...”

“... received no letter from you lately/for a long time.’In The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Paul Fussell argued that A. 2042 ‘uniquely characterises the modern world’. It is ‘the progenitor of all modern forms on which you fill in things or cross things out or check off things’. In fact, the earliest blank form predates A. 2042 by several ...”

“... points out the totality of fantasy represented by Jimimie Fane, the biographee. As his friend Paul Fussell admiringly told Wolcott, Amis-lovers in America revered him chiefly for his absolute lack of ‘sincerity’, that great American quality: ‘everything about Amis is figurative.’ Wriggling out of sincerity like a tight shirt has always been ...”

“... this book I cannot explain,’ he wisely concedes.) But he has come up with a nice idea. Just as Paul Fussell set himself, in The Great War and Modern Memory, to map the mythicisation of the First World War in the popular conscience – the images and icons we remember it by, and how these are themselves symptomatic of the selective desires, prejudices ...”

“... Down was originally written for a branch of the OSS, the Foreign Information Service, and is (as Paul Fussell notes in Writing in Wartime) ‘virtually indistinguishable from the emissions of the Office of War Information’. Bombs Away was written for the Army Air Corps. In the scoundrel time, after the war, Steinbeck went along with the inquisitions ...”

“... and writers tend to claim transformational status for the war they happen to be writing about, as Paul Fussell did for the Great War – which was also declared exceptional by those who thought of it as the war to end all wars. War is always modernising. The increasing use of unmanned drones by the Americans in the current campaigns renders it ...”