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“... is their genius. People have always liked a soldier who dreams of his typewriter. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are a staple of the National Curriculum, and Evelyn Waugh saw the possibility of comedy in the matter before anybody else, his William Boot a writer keen to make the rat-tat-tat of his typewriter fall into sync with the sound of gunfire ...”

“... acting for Hitler, and Raffaele Travaglini, acting for the Vatican. Besides being the lover of Siegfried Sassoon, Hessen was also the king of Italy’s son-in-law and fluent in Italian. He had lived in Italy for some years and was exceptionally well connected. As soon as Pacelli was elected pope, Hitler, wishing to avoid any repetition of Pius XI’s ...”

“... and war psychologist William Rivers (whom Graves met at Craiglockhart hospital, when Siegfried Sassoon was also a patient there in the summer of 1917, and to whom he dedicated On English Poetry in 1922) had also inspired his interest in early matriarchal societies. The White Goddess reads as though, after taking all this in and shaking it up ...”

“... verse epistles to her. Apollinaire’s war poems tend neither to be satirical, like, say, those of Siegfried Sassoon, nor outraged in the manner of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. Many apply the modernist sublime mode developed in poems such as ‘Vendémiaire’ and ‘Cortège’ to the theatre of war, which can result in some rather ...”

“... so careless, That, should you drop to a doze, Wind’s fumble or men’s feet Are in your face. Siegfried Sassoon wrote about the ‘sculptural’ quality of Rosenberg’s poetry. The pieces of paper on which the poems are written are full of doodled drawings of human figures. It is the bulk of these featureless figures that is striking, the way they ...”

“... Walton was ‘fired’ to complete his own First Symphony, as he explained to his generous patron, Siegfried Sassoon. He was happier in his cordial though not unclouded relationship with the less creatively threatening Malcolm Arnold; and in his Ischia-based friendship with the much younger and stylistically distant figure of Hans Werner Henze, but to ...”

“... Scott Moncrieff, who introduced Coward to Oscar Wilde’s lover Robbie Ross, through whom he met Siegfried Sassoon. But Coward wasn’t a bohemian or part of any set that could even retrospectively be seen as countercultural. He absorbed many of the ideals of the lower-middle-class Edwardian England in which he grew up and never repudiated ...”

“... it’s unbelievable that these two barn door fowls can have hatched this wild swan.’ Siegfried Sassoon thought Rex was ‘showing signs of falling under my spell’, although he preferred Stephen Tennant, and perhaps most of all, being ‘up late with the two of them, in succession, straightening out their sorrows’. Tallulah Bankhead was ...”

“... expressed observations of human nature’ and ‘a rather cheap and shallow philosophy of life’. Siegfried Sassoon ended his sympathetic 1948 study of Meredith with the reflection that ‘he stands the test of being thought about when one is out of doors’; but by then that must have felt like a voice from a long dead past. About the same time, in ...”

“... more social recreation. Among those who wrote to Carpenter and sought him out were Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Forster, who became a close friend. By the time he made contact in 1913, Forster was already a well-known writer. He regarded Carpenter as ‘a saviour’. It is not hard to imagine how Merrill viewed all these adoring new ...”

“... other. This is from Pat Barker’s The Eye in the Door, the second of the Regeneration trilogy. Siegfried Sassoon is talking about the public obsession with the Pemberton-Billing trial. (Pemberton-Billing was sued for libel by the actress Maud Allen for publishing an article suggesting that a large number of her audience at the opening of Oscar ...”

“... work. Rupert Brooke, setting out to fight at Gallipoli, died before he ever got there. One of Siegfried Sassoon’s brothers was killed in action there, but Sassoon himself went to France. Sir Compton Mackenzie’s Gallipoli Memories (1929) hardly ranks alongside Goodbye to all that. By default, the rare ...”

“... by the collection when she read it. ‘Call me anything but Mrs Hardy,’ Florence later said to Siegfried Sassoon. ‘That name seems to belong to someone else.’ Hardy’s tactlessness after Emma’s death involved writing at length to Florence about her predecessor (‘the good lady’s virtues are beginning to weigh heavily on my shoulders,’ she ...”

“... and malodorous fog that made it harder for German gunners to find their targets.As Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and other memoirists of the First World War made clear, there was always a radical division between ‘the line’ and ‘behind the line’. The line meant mud, blood, rats, inedible rations and the continuous, unbearable thunder of ...”

“... there was less for the people who designed those buildings and who would seek refuge in Britain. Siegfried Sassoon abhorred the organised social lie of Blomfield’s Menin Gate at Ypres:‘Their name liveth for ever’ the Gateway claimsWas ever an immolation so beliedAs these intolerably nameless names?Well might the Dead who struggled in the slimeRise ...”