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“... Edward Thomas​ believed that up to about the age of four what he called ‘a sweet darkness’ enfolded him ‘with a faint blessing’. It was, though, a darkness and the blessing was faint. ‘From an early age’, Jean Moorcroft Wilson writes, Thomas ‘felt cursed by a self-consciousness he believed the chief cause of his later problems and depression ...”

“... which, not being especially carnivorous, we find it hard to dispose of. This year, though, Inigo Thomas, having been brought up on such fare, has offered to take them off our hands (and later sends round a brace in a delicious casserole).7 February. Nick H. rings this morning to say they’d been talking over the play at the theatre and the general feeling ...”

“... One of the many excellent photographs Barry Webb has assembled shows Blunden going out to bat with Rupert Hart-Davis, in a match between Jonathan Cape and the Alden Press. That was in 1938. Blunden looks miniature, a frail determined Don Quixote with eagle nose and jaw, who had persuaded the burly Yorkshireman as they set out for the crease together not to wear batting gloves, which were unsporting ...”

“... having put himself in the way of it in the first place. Bridget goes round pretty much at my pace, Rupert as always slower and taking more in, noting the tears brimming in Lucrezia’s eyes, for instance, and how she has had to half slip herself out of her heavily brocaded dress the more easily to stab herself. He marvels at the oath of the Batavii which (it ...”

“... an old acquaintance of Sassoon’s, still cuts a dignified figure; it was indeed only in 1925, as Rupert Hart-Davis tells us in one of his meticulous (and most helpful) footnotes, that this ‘critic, biographer and man of letters’, born in 1849, was knighted. Frank Schuster (1840-1928), ‘wealthy musiclover and giver of parties’, was still giving ...”

“... Welsh songs at the top of his voice, while his friend accompanied him on a penny whistle. Edward Thomas must have remembered his companion’s musical habits a few years later, when naming one of his most effective poems ‘The Penny Whistle’. Arthur Ransome in turn may well have recalled that poem, which evokes a charcoal-burners’ camp at night, when in ...”

“... wrong year: but this very arbitrariness could be made to seem providential. The opening line of Rupert Brooke’s War Sonnets proclaimed an Infantry subaltern’s credo: ‘Now God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour.’ The public school ideal, heightened and purified by the war, forms the passionate core of Vera Brittain’s newly-published ...”

“... whose head is compared to that of Veronese’s equerry, is echoed in Prince’s late portrait of Rupert Brooke, which lingers over the soldier-poet’s ‘bare-throated profile with the tumbled bright young hair’, and decides that he is ‘beautiful/As with a woman’s beauty, and yet masculine’. It’s a beauty that is consecrated and preserved by ...”

“... and could not devote themselves to the intricacies of 30 April-2 May 1982, even if their owner Rupert Murdoch so wished – which he emphatically doesn’t. Peter Riddell of the Financial Times has taken an educated interest, but he is also in the House of Commons Lobby, and you cannot expect Lobby journalists to allow themselves to be perceived as part of ...”

“... in her choices of heroes and heroines, all solitary, intrepid, self-determining figures – Thomas Mann, Simone Weil, Vladimir Nabokov – and it is most eloquently displayed in her essay on Melville’s Bartleby. As in her last volume of essays, Seduction and Betrayal, which had among its female victims and survivors a very persuasive account of ...”

“... down Parliament, i.e. proroguing, which I got in one.7 July. I am a messy eater, messy altogether Rupert would say, and getting more so by the day. I’m what my mother used to call ‘a mullocks’ and once did a recital in the Double Cube room at Wilton in a velvet suit with my flies open. These days I prepare, or am prepared, for meals in an ...”

“... this convention may be changing: one can imagine the kind of history of the Times of the 1980s Rupert Murdoch would be likely to commission, or pass. It is hard to see him frightened by the prospect of hostile reviews: ‘Murdoch Loses Sleep over Bias Jibe’ – well, hardly. With publishers it is often more a matter of noblesse oblige: if you peddle ...”

“... crime, horror, romance, science fiction. A couple of titles resist such categorisation – Thomas Glavinic’s Pull Yourself Together, for example, ‘a modern update on Georges Perec’s classic Life: A User’s Manual, written in accessible, clear prose’ – but its baby steps into quality lit aren’t yet in evidence. (One signing is the actor ...”

“... are picked clean and the clean bones gone/They shall have stars at elbow and foot,’ as Dylan Thomas wrote: ‘And death shall have no dominion.’ On the other hand, decaying flesh could transmit the holiness of the soul it once sheltered through contact relics. Dirt from a grave, water in which a saint had been washed for burial, straw from his bed, or ...”

“... of trench-warfare but dictated by them, and in the process he exposed for ever the hollowness of Rupert Brooke-type patriotic rhetoric, and to a large degree of traditional patriotism itself. It is a story with a lot of truth in it, and yet somehow one does not want ever to hear it again; it wears thin, in a way that the poems themselves do not. It ...”