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“... 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 ...”

“... has an internationalism still rare in such anthologies. In this respect, it’s an improvement on Paul Fussell’s recent The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern War. Fussell covers a bigger time-span, and where his choices overlap with Richler’s, his extracts from them tend to be both better-chosen and longer. All ...”

“... no appeal, the one ‘likeness’ guaranteed to show you looking the way you never want to look. Paul Fussell called it ‘the most egregious little modernism’, redolent of ‘the world of Prufrock and Joseph K and Malone’, and indeed every time my photo is scrutinised by a passport officer, it’s as if I’ve entered that same world of anxiety and ...”

“... so. Perhaps we are in the realm of that more general, sexually innocent homoeroticism discussed by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) or in Martin Taylor’s less fashionable, less thesis-driven anthology, Lads, republished in 1998. In Taylor’s collection, so often are the poems bad, unaware (Ronald-like?) or puny that the best among ...”

“... country is a grey hinterland in which nothing interesting seems to be happening. He has none of Paul Fussell’s concern, in The Great War and Modern Memory, to know ‘what the ordinary man has to say about it all’. Seduced by the flamboyance of the Billings and the Rosses, Hoare has little time for the world of Pat Barker’s Billy Prior, the ...”

“... 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 example, with the long World War One sequence ...”

“... in France. In 1975 he was moved to write to the historian Michael Howard by exasperation with Paul Fussell’s newly published The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell, an American critic and veteran of World War Two, suggested that what had happened to those who fought in France was so uniquely dreadful that it ...”

“... until the century’s second great catastrophe. This is not the common view. The title alone of Paul Fussell’s enormously influential The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), for example, proclaims the contrary. So does the concluding line – ‘Never such innocence again’ – of Philip Larkin’s 1960 poem ‘MCMXIV’, invoking the summer ...”