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“... Croft, the fecund scriptwriters of Dad’s Army, dreamed up in a dizzy moment? Not so. Charles Graves, an early historian of the Home Guard, refers to a unit which suggested in orders that any rudimentary weapons ‘could be usefully supplemented by a packet of pepper to interfere with the vision of any persistent unwelcome visitor’. Not, perhaps, the ...”

“... Till recently, I’ve dodged most of Peter Reading’s work. He seemed so much the darling of the TLS and of a metropolitan circle whose powerfully disseminated views it is often essential to evade in the interests of finding a position which affords a degree of independence. Seeing stray poems by him in magazines, I thought of him as having a gift of designer outrage, whose appeal to the sophisticated might be suspect ...”

“... spilled over naturally into writing it: Garfitt went to informal workshops with John Wain and Peter Levi, heard Ted Hughes read at the Poetry Society. Coghill read his poems, but wasn’t very enthusiastic; Peter Jay took a photo of him in a green silk smoking jacket looking ‘just like Rupert Brooke!’; he talked ...”

“... and the rest dismantled. On the British side, the machines veered off course to dig their own graves, to be sealed up in mid-Channel and drowned in concrete. The remote ancestor of the giant machines, over a thousand tons in weight, was the Brunel shield invented by the great British engineer (actually a French émigré by origin) who designed it for the ...”

“... Poe at once and liked his work, had a dark side too, and a sensuous passion for the dead and their graves, for night as the mother, and for oblivion. When his friend Horace Traubel, who also wanted to be his Boswell, interrogated Whitman about events in his life, the poet had no trouble combining a benevolent openness with the slyest possible duplicity. As to ...”

“... Lord Byron’), ‘Paul’s Tattoo’ (alluding to ‘Tattoos’ in James Merrill’s sequence ‘Peter’), ‘An Island Sheaf’ (alluding to Hart Crane’s Key West: An Island Sheaf), ‘Summer Landscape’, ‘Lily and Bronze’, ‘After the Fourth’, ‘American Sublime’ (alluding to Stevens’s ‘The American Sublime’). Even Doty’s cleverest ...”

“... point for the regrets and frustrations of his literary generation. He was a mixture of Pan and Peter Pan. Clive Fisher, who has written a very good book on Noel Coward, was quite right to give this elegant study the subtitle ‘A Nostalgic Life’. Being Anglo-Irish helped the nostalgia. Connolly senior had been a Major in the British Army and when he ...”

“... the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame or both, some not: but then, not now, was their moment. Was Connolly himself any good as a writer? The question means little because the point of Connolly turned out to be Connolly not producing the masterpieces which ...”

“... and of Vita in particular, but his shotgun method reached many others, including Robert Graves and Laura Riding, J.C. Squire, and London literary politics in general. Some of the lines are funny, even witty, but more often the abuse is heavy, repetitious and sprawling: when Campbell was hating, he didn’t know when to stop. Still, the poem is as ...”

“... of the faith: a tenet of the Nicaean creed, a testing-ground for heresy. At the last trump, the graves would yield up their dead and all – saints and sinners – would be reunited with their flesh. St Paul’s prophecy drew the scene in the first letter to the Corinthians, using the metaphor of a seed planted in the ground, which grows into a ...”

“... the swimmers smiled and shouted back: ‘Nyet.’ ‘Photos of the event reveal a comic scene,’ Peter Carlson writes, ‘the swimmers waving and cheering, Khrushchev beaming and gesturing grandly, Nixon smiling wanly, his formal white shirt buttoned at the cuffs, his sober black tie fastened tightly at his collar. He was not a man with a gift for ...”

“... made by the BBC, several websites and the syndication of photographic rights across the globe. Peter Firstbrook’s book is written from a very English perspective, Ghosts of Everest from a very American one: neither takes up the really important issues. The Last Climb began life as a history of all the early Everest expeditions but, once Mallory’s body ...”

“... compiled on the principle that if the right key words show up on the data-base (‘death’, ‘graves’, ‘cremation’, ‘bereavement’), we might as well print out what theses we can find – but to be fair, this is a first book-length venture of the Social History Society of the UK, and the choice of topic has its own significance. Dinnage’s book ...”

“... of little wanderers might be seen in all directions spreading over the moor, or sitting by the graves of the slain ... Others, more advanced in years, were intent on hunting rabbits (and) parties in carriages, gigs and carts were frequently arriving; and altogether these could scarcely be less, in the middle of the day, than three thousand persons on the ...”

“... memory. C’est très bon. Another letter describes the trenches: Filth – rubbish everywhere, graves built into the defences – scattered about promiscuously, feet – clothing breaking through the soil, water – muck on all sides; – about this scene in dazzling moonlight troops of enormous rats creep – glide, to the increasing accompaniment of ...”