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“... the rhythms of thought and breaking the natural phrase as if breaking a surface. Her translator, Peter Graves, more than rises to the challenge this presents. He has found a register in English – both offhand and choral – that brings the voices together without letting them merge. The result is that these eight hundred sparse pages offer as much as ...”

“... is dark and slippery and began by turning the former hero, Jim Phelps, long and suavely played by Peter Graves, into a faintly smiling villain played by Jon Voight. This did not go down well with everyone. Martin Landau, who was the master of disguise in the television series, said the original show ‘was a mind game. The ideal mission was getting in ...”

“... Four possible candidates, varying in attainments, would be T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Peter Fleming (perhaps both Flemings) and Richard Hughes. It makes no difference that Lawrence was half-Irish, the Flemings mostly Scottish, and Hughes partly Welsh. The presidential or father figure of the group would ...”

“... By spring​ 1919, Robert Graves was a demobilised war veteran, a new father and the author of four volumes of poetry. At this moment came ‘the first poem I wrote as myself’, as his autobiography describes ‘Rocky Acres’. After surviving years of front-line bombardment, a shell splinter through his right lung and the postwar influenza epidemic, Graves had returned to his cottage in the Welsh hills ...”

“... by making them traipse across the land. They would fight only if the Persians tried to loot their graves: ‘Attack those graves and you will soon discover whether we are fighters or not!’ Eventually, his army sickening and hungry, Darius gave up and returned to Persia. Nomadic civilisations pose many of the same ...”

“... of chronic infection’. One prominent and colourful devotee of focal sepsis was Thomas Chivers Graves, medical superintendent of the Rubery Hill and Hollymoor Asylums in Birmingham, who ‘aggressively treated all the mental patients hospitalised in the Birmingham area along Cotton’s lines’ until after the Second World War. Even Cotton was surprised to ...”

“... could be turned in his clay to the bung in a wine barrel. It is a trope that recurs repeatedly in Peter Redgrove’s recent work, You take turns to be food, Before you can grind wheat you have to be wheat, Before you can eat bread you are a nice new crust Eaten by Mary, who chooses a crust-you here, A mouthful of Shakespeare’s breath there, a glass Of ...”

“... faced, with such a choice? In 1917 or thereabouts, Siegfried Sassoon confided to his friend Robert Graves that he was planning to ‘go public’, as a decorated front-line officer, with what he knew about real conditions on the Western Front. Graves had him put away for ‘shell-shock’, for his own good. That was ...”

“... shelves and cupboards covered in boldly patterned plastic laminate. At the same time Michael Graves was designing buildings, kettles and chairs that seemed close relatives to things in old cartoon films. Such work defined ‘postmodern’ better than words could. I wouldn’t call Arad that, but his work seemed to signal the end of the age of the Great ...”

“... publican, and baker, now me, bard adding poetry to their beef, beer and bread. With Byron three graves on I’ll not go short of company, and Wordsworth’s opposite. That’s two peers already, of a sort, and we’ll all be thrown together if the pit, whose galleries once ran beneath this plot, causes the distinguished dead to drop into the rabblement of ...”

“... from The Shepherd’s Calendar largely as they first appeared in Blackwood’s. In A Queer Book Peter Garside has chosen to use Hogg’s manuscripts as his copy-text, where these seem to offer something like a final version. On occasion, however, he produces composite texts put together from more than one manuscript, or from a manuscript combined with a ...”

“... consists of being glacial, or being condescending. He sits down to read Rupert Brooke near the graves of a major and a private, and muses thus: ‘I cannot help thinking of the two together and of the greater value of the one. What a pity it is that the same little piece of lead takes away as easily a brilliant life and one that is merely vegetation. The ...”

“... this revisionist direction was taken in 1961 by the professional adviser to Magnusson’s series, Peter Sawyer. His The Age of the Vikings, one of the few recent studies not reissued this year, was a brilliant essay whose basic purpose was to explain the Viking explosion by arguing that there was nothing very exceptional about it. The Vikings were warrior ...”

“... mood. Mesostic (as in acrostic) versetributes to friends; reminiscences of the painter, Morris Graves, irritatingly garbled, so that we learn next to nothing; an account of the international eating-habits of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; an I Ching- assisted scrambling of the text of Thoreau’s – Journals (‘a o eeth h d c. Yw ...”

“... or perhaps really just about the most literary ones. Apart from the well-known poetry and prose of Graves, Sassoon, Owen, Blunden and the rest, there were considerable amounts of other published memoir material. An example is that of Bernard Adams, one of a series of reprints – The Fourteen-Eighteen collection – edited by an antiquarian bookseller, ...”