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“... One is the production of Michael Hastings’s play, Tom and Viv, and the other the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, T.S. Eliot. They of course share a subject, the poet himself. But this choice of subject, the life of the writer with perhaps the biggest public image of any in our time, suggests something else they have in common. These two works ...”

“... or ‘Essential Beauty’, with its ambivalent response to the vast billboards that ‘Screen graves with custard, cover slums with praise/Of motor-oil and cuts of salmon’. These are perfect pictures, Larkin sternly counsels, ‘of how life should be’ but isn’t, since in life nothing’s ‘new or washed quite clean’, and the glamorous girl ...”

“... a century earlier, when Heinrich Schliemann, after unearthing a gold death mask from the shaft graves at Mycenae, declared in a telegram that he had gazed on the face of Agamemnon. But then, a few years after the initial discovery, a rival candidate emerged as the occupant of Tomb II. Philip III, a half-brother of Alexander, who was first called Arrhidaeus ...”

“... handing out large sums at unpredictable moments (for example, to his old wartime friend Robert Graves, but only after they had ceased to be real friends).Sassoon was a great self-fashioner. He was also intensely self-aware, open-hearted (though capable of mean-spiritedness), restless, prickly, brave, idealistic, never content, eternally tussling with what ...”

“... in the grisly work of reburying thousands of British soldiers who had been placed in temporary graves. This horrifying task seems not to have affected her spirits adversely; on the contrary, like many rebellious women of her era, she seems to have been curiously enlivened by the spectacle of mass (male) destruction. ‘If the men who had served in the ...”

“... burying a few thousand of us. He may yet bury more. We, of course, are sending his kind to their graves in Afghanistan, Iraq and other corners of the Islamic patrimony. Osama’s is a two-theatre war: one on the battlefield, the other on the airwaves. For a guy on the run, he is not doing badly. Although his loyalists are killed, wounded and ...”

“... pre-conference skirmishers were all on the left. The hardly well-kept secret leaked out that Peter Mokaba, the fiery head of the youth section, had had a career as a police informer. Mokaba has become so prominent that it would be embarrassing for the ANC leadership to admit to this, so we suddenly found him cropping up at Mandela’s side to welcome ...”

“... in India with little finesse: but he seems to have fared rather better with the Imperial War Graves Commission. This work also enabled him to develop his elemental Classicism to new levels of abstraction, which made it a superb vehicle for expressing the tragedy of war. Baker, who preferred homely, vernacular, sentimental crosses, found Lutyens’s war ...”

“... Brigade is another – that the British seem almost to revel in, even to gain strength from. As Peter Cook said in Beyond the Fringe, ‘we need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war.’ The general verdict today is that it could never have worked. The strategy was foolish and hopeless. One major of the Gurkhas thought that ...”

“... with thyroxine, or trying to break them psychologically by forcing them to dig their own graves. The Interior Ministry operates 42 official prisons authorised to house civilian detainees. Information about them is relatively easy to come by and they are sometimes even inspected. Yet abuse and torture are rife, encouraged by a legal system which in ...”

“... eyes, smiling the cheerful smile of the dead, Munditia still greets visitors to the Church of St Peter in her glass case. Since the late 17th century she has served as the patroness and protector of single, unmarried women. Her feast day, traditionally celebrated with great ceremony, falls on 17 November. Koudounaris describes the miraculous cures that the ...”

“... not only our poem, but the poem of Keats, Wordsworth, Browning, Yeats, Eliot, Auden. Only Robert Graves and Laura Riding saw through it; but to return with them to the Shakespeare of Donne and Marvell is to abolish the Shakespeare of Keats and Yeats. Malone’s edition, of course, had a more problematic consequence for Shakespeare: it had him pining once ...”

“... a romantic comedy at the pictures after that. The so-called ‘morbid’ age was also, as Robert Graves and Alan Hodge suggested in 1940, when calling their social history of the interwar years The Long Weekend, an age of mass pleasures, of the lido, rambling and cycling clubs, the first holiday camps and the dance hall (the ‘Lambeth Walk’ was the ...”

“... BBC sound engineer. He had always obscurely relished going underground; caves, tunnels and passage-graves run through his poems and plays. In Persons from Porlock, Hank’s liking for potholes is mixed up with both his drive to paint and his early abandonment by his mother. MacNeice, whose mother was taken into psychiatric care when he was five, and died just ...”

“... the strain. Is there enough inherent strength in ‘the sinews of the Russian state’, to use Peter Reddaway’s phrase, to sustain the free and democratic political life which its leaders advocate, and of which there are some signs? The answers Richard Sakwa and Alexander Yakovlev give to these questions are discouraging, even where they are not meant to ...”