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“... all the more compelling for its quiet understatement, its gentle but remorseless irony. Some like Siegfried Sassoon shouted themselves hoarse in trying to penetrate the carapace of ignorance which protected the illusions of the population at home. And there were some, like the master of them all, Wilfred Owen, who found the high poetic diction of ...”

“... with Turner, who naturally knew other people in the literary world, and introduced him to Siegfried Sassoon, then literary editor of the Daily Herald, ‘who in turn introduced him to his fellow scribbler of the 36th Brigade, Edmund Blunden’. It was thus that, at the age of 20, Rickword himself became a published poet, with the ...”

“... hang-outs in Paris, Vienna and Berlin. Stephen Tennant became an enfant terrible, the love of Siegfried Sassoon, and a fairly famous aesthete. He died this year. In 1894, a decade or so before David and Stephen were born, Kipling wrote a poem which might have been about them – ‘The “Mary Gloster” ’. He rolled them into one and made them the ...”

“... pounded the positions inked in red on the exhibition’s trench map of Fricourt – it belonged to Siegfried Sassoon – has been replaced by guidance systems that can pinpoint buildings in cities tens or hundreds of miles away. War will press the limits of whatever information technology is current.Heroic 18th and 19th-century feats of base-line ...”

“... It was a historical novel, based on the work of the Army psychologist W.H.R. Rivers, who treated Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart Hospital in 1917. The political burden of the fiction is explicit. This is the story of Sassoon’s rebellion against the continuation of the war, and of the process ...”

“... did not prevent his loyal wife asserting that ‘Walter is a splendid driver already.’ Consider Sassoon himself, at the time only slightly instructed in the art of managing his new car, colliding with ‘a dog-cart going at full speed’ and immediately recording that ‘increasing confidence makes me genuinely enjoy the car’; and being equally ...”

“... Modernism now looks to have been the outright winner, that was not how things seemed at the time. Siegfried Sassoon, who almost hero-worshipped Blunden as well as helping him with money, saw him as the epitome of the old chivalric and rural values. His poetry was widely read and far more popular than that of the Moderns. The affirmation at the end of ...”

“... seems to occupy an intellectual and imaginative backwater (the Athenaeum?) where the poems of Sassoon never circulate and Massingham’s Nation is never found on the library table. Two years after the war, Haggard has still not heard of Sassoon. ‘I am not fortunate enough to be acquainted with the works of ...”

“... a guest in the Ottleys’ small London house and shows no signs of ever going away. She is, wrote Siegfried Sassoon, like ‘a really great impressionist picture by Whistler or Manet’, who, ‘to tell you the truth, rather dumps the others, dear Sphinx’. Sassoon was right. Edith and Aylmer are less interesting than ...”

“... longer answer is that ‘in the early chapters of their autobiographies, Coleridge, Hardy, Yeats, Sassoon, Graves, Day Lewis, Spender and MacNeice have a good deal to say about the external circumstances of their family lives, but little about their internal or “writerly” lives.’ That is true, though some of these poets have left us evidence of their ...”

“... The eye-aching effects of The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke, the tour de force (presented by Siegfried Sassoon to the Tate in 1963) on which Dadd laboured for nearly a decade in Bedlam, derive not only from the sheer quantity of detail but from the blades and stems of grass traversing the foreground and intersecting the scenes beyond. The sharp ...”

“... determined little man, whose rank, I fancy, gives him some consistency, not otherwise his’. Siegfried Sassoon (a feeble judge of character) found him at first ‘unreal, appallingly distant and exclusively intellectual’. He was homosexual but seems not to have had much of a sex-life, remarking bitterly later on that sex had almost always just ...”

“... the neurologist William Rivers and his severely shellshocked charges. The most famous of them is Siegfried Sassoon, who was sent to a psychiatric hospital after he issued a public declaration against the continuation of the war. But much more striking is Billy Prior, who advances stealthily through the trilogy, beginning as a mute casualty and ending as ...”

“... far greater experience than himself. Nevertheless the popular image remained that projected by Siegfried Sassoon and Oh what a lovely war: of a general who stubbornly year after year consigned scores of thousands of young soldiers to horrible deaths in pursuit of an insane strategy, using outmoded tactics under conditions he did not begin to ...”

“... a favour, or having to ask for a favour himself. When he gets the right foil, such as the hapless Siegfried Sassoon, the standard of nastiness is worthy of the Great Literary Rows. O’Prey’s choice of letters leaves the impression, fairly or not, that Graves has been a man with few private attachments who has nourished himself mainly on ...”