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“... it to the end. The nostos makes no appeal to them. ‘With Lawrence and Douglas and Huxley and Graves,’ Mr Fussell writes, ‘and later, Durrell, Isherwood and Auden, departure is attended by the conviction that England is uninhabitable because it is not like abroad ... An insistent leitmotif of writing between the wars, for both successful and would-be ...”

“... no, very old actors – to become the age the time of the action requires. The 76-year-old Robert De Niro gets to play the 40-year-old Sheeran, as well as the same man at 55 and 83. For the record, Harvey Keitel (b. 1939), Al Pacino (b. 1940) and Joe Pesci (b. 1943) also get to inhabit different times, though Pacino, as Jimmy Hoffa, doesn’t live so ...”

“... men​ and furious machines.’ No verb, no explanation – it is the first line of ‘Dutch Graves in Bucks County’, a poem that Wallace Stevens published in 1943. The image may have come from a march-of-time documentary of Americans training to fight in the Second World War. Probably the machines included tanks and a lorry convoy, possibly a squadron ...”

“... that silences, or ought to silence, any post-Movement tendency to scoff. Like Dylan Thomas, like Graves, Heaney assumed the noble vestments, but he did so with an engaging awkwardness, a persuasive lack of flourish. One of the fascinations of Heaney’s work, read from the beginning until now, is in observing how he shifts this way and that to find a ...”

“... would happen to them if they did not go to war. Where, though, did responsibility lie? Partly, Robert Evans explains, with Austro-Hungary – but only partly, because the war its leaders wanted under Serbian provocation was only a small localised conflict, a third Balkan war. The main responsibility lay with the German leaders, who alone wanted a major war ...”

“... and bones and jostling with beggars, priests and tourists on the tiny walkways that rise over the graves of their predecessors. The removal of the sacred object put me in mind of the sequence of theft and conquest that makes up any African nation’s history. There was the original theft that led to the conquest of the Queen of Sheba by Solomon: I wondered ...”

“... number of Hogg’s other novels and stories, including the most famous of all. The first victim of Robert Wringhim the justified sinner, and his diabolical shadow Gil-Martin, is a minister who sits up when shot; and when Wringhim’s own body comes to be buried, it has stiffened into a sitting posture, so that one of the burial party, in a passage expunged in ...”

“... national anthem, with full military honours. He lies at the top of a gentle slope lined with the graves of a dozen Red Army generals, under the birches and pines of eternal Russia. Inevitably, that was not the end of the matter. Drawing on those conversations, Phillip Knightley has now published a revised version of the original Sunday Times ...”

“... reviewer in the TLS to speculate that ‘Proust and Lampedusa must be turning in their graves, laughing their heads off at the comparison.’ Villalonga, by contrast, who died in 1980, denied that his work was ‘Lampedusian’, and his Spanish publisher makes no such claim on his behalf. Nevertheless in Spain he is regularly dubbed ‘the Spanish ...”

“... forgiven for that. Karl was much given to leaving – ‘more of a born leaver’, he said of Robert Lowell, whose wife had made the mistake of calling him ‘a born joiner’. He started at the Treasury, had a short stint in television; became literary editor first of the Spectator, then the Statesman; joined the Listener as editor in 1967 and the ...”

“... of 1854, at the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations in New York, an engineer called Elisha Graves Otis gave regular demonstrations of his new safety device. Otis had himself hoisted into the air on a platform secured on either side by guide-rails and – at a suitably dramatic height – cut the cable. Instead of plummeting to the ground fifty feet ...”

“... cut. The quotation ends with ‘What unfailing taste he possessed’ – full stop.) Jarrell, as Robert Lowell once observed, was actually more of a eulogist than a destroyer and it was in the realm of eulogy that his weakness for near-spluttering exaggeration was at its most off-putting. When Jarrell admired a writer, that writer had to be vaunted to the ...”

“... than thirty men’. Then follows a remarkable passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, ...”

“... I have walked with him through the cemeteries of Budapest and have seen in his company some of the graves he writes about. He is a remarkable man, the product of a culture and a time in which one either drowned or saved oneself through erudition, wit, irony and an unremitting conversation with history. I once told him that I envied the political exigency of ...”

“... certificate, on which her father claimed Durban as his birthplace, and a journalist called Robert Greer as his father. She sought his traces in the usual formal registers of Tasmania, where he had grown up, Victoria and South Africa. She pursued the Greers of the world backward through Griers, Griersons, Gregors and Macgregors to the kith of Scottish ...”