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“... 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 ...”

“... elders they respected are still around, and capable of spry conversation – Empson, Fuller, Graves. Mr Morrison, of course, knew this, and addressed some inquiries to relevant survivors. Some responded – not Amis, I notice, and not Larkin, for reasons no doubt easily guessed at; but Conquest, doyen of the group, co-operated, and so did Davie, who is ...”

“... is without its thinker. We get instead a few pages each on Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, Aldington, Graves, T.E. Lawrence and on the English idée fixe of a lost or sacrificed generation. Wohl has no difficulty in identifying this as largely mythical – the slaughter was great, but very far from including a whole generation – or in showing how class-bound ...”

“... office. Outside, next to one of the prison walls, is a patch of grass; beneath it are the unmarked graves of the prisoners executed at the jail. Casement’s body was exhumed in 1965 and sent to Ireland; a former governor said he had witnessed the removal as a young prison officer. ‘I love Pentonville Prison,’ he said in his speech. Me, I can’t say I ...”

“... cowering in their consulting-rooms, and better certainly than any political scientist. Take Robert McKenzie, the television psephologist and master of the swingometer, a figure well-known in the Sixties, but now safely dead – and, as we shall see, without heirs who might want to sue on his behalf. A TV producer once had the idea of filming Abse and ...”

“... afternoon, with its atmosphere of electioneering and death, brings to mind the insistent taps of Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’: The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year – wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns. Senator John Forbes Kerry, the nominee, didn’t spring ...”

“... volumes of the prosecution’s documentary evidence, the unpublished papers of the US prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, and of the principal US judge, Francis Biddle, and numerous published memoirs. Both have consulted unpublished collections of papers in the US and Britain, although in some cases not the same ones; and both regale us with titbits from ...”

“... a middle phase in The Performing Self (1971) and Norman Mailer (1972), on to the major study of Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977), and culminating in The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (1987) and Poetry and Pragmatism (1992), now belatedly under review. More perhaps than anyone else, Poirier has led the fierce revival of Ralph Waldo ...”

“... democracy, but they have also held up Pericles’ funeral oration, delivered in 430 bc over the graves of the first casualties of the war, as a eulogy to the civic virtues of the ancient world’s most democratic society. Thucydides seems to anticipate this sort of debate by salting his work with antilogies, paired speeches (in one case, an exchange of ...”

“... there would have been too upsetting.’In The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (1989), Robert Wistrich argues that for Roth ‘the world of the shtetl re-emerged as the ideal embodiment of a lost intimacy and innocence; the materialist values of the Western Bürgertum (Jewish and Gentile) represented its self-alienated antithesis.’ Roth’s ...”

“... allowed not to take part in the shooting, and suffered no punishment. The other helpful book is Robert Jay Lifton’s magnificent The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986). Lifton interviewed a number of doctors who had worked at Auschwitz, some of them prisoners and others SS medical officers on the camp staff. No research ...”

“... to a tune from Holst’s Planets, to paper over the yawning fissures left by Sassoon and Owen and Graves. But from the Laureate none was forthcoming. Robert Bridges was too aggressively uncommitted, and perhaps too honest a poet, to do the right thing. (When he went to the Palace in 1913 to receive the office he snapped at ...”

“... dead. It has never lived. I created it. I made it with my own hands from the bodies I took from graves, from the gallows, anywhere.’ What is spooky about the creature when we finally see it whole, as it backs into the room and turns towards the light, with its stiff legs, short-armed suit, heavy boots, bolt in its neck, is its unearthliness. It doesn’t ...”

“... in Venice or attracted a Defoe or a Camus. Its victims, mostly children, have gone to their early graves anonymously, so there have been no stories to tell. As for the researches and discoveries of the scientists who have worked on it, they have failed to stimulate celebratory writings for the general public, despite their importance, their originality and ...”

“... people; the medics in Kiev and Moscow Hospital 6 who attended the injured and irradiated; and Dr Robert Gale, the American surgeon who joined them. You have Mikhail Gorbachev, the charismatic, controversial Soviet leader, castigated for remaining silent from 26 April to 14 May, who nevertheless seized on the Chernobyl accident to add powerful impetus to his ...”