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“... John Smith was ‘one of them’. Tony Blair is ‘one of them’. And so are Chris Smith and Jack Straw and half the Shadow Cabinet and many more on the backbenches including Frank Field, that one-man think-tank of the Labour Right. ‘They’ are the Christian socialists, architects of New Labour, ready to provide the movement with the ethical foundations which seem sorely missing ...”

“... different social and economic order, or else as the light that failed. The achievement of Donald Sassoon’s One Hundred Years of Socialism is to offer a full and convincing resolution of this problem. Sassoon’s approach is catholic. He does not adopt a restrictive definition of socialism but looks at each ...”

“... her? It is that question, in all its historical and cultural ramifications, which is addressed in Donald Sassoon’s elegant and comprehensive study of the Mona Lisa phenomenon. ‘She is older than the rocks among which she sits’, wrote the Victorian aesthete Walter Pater, poetically if not very gallantly. In more measured terms she is getting on for ...”

“... stock and barrel of which were barely connected, and my father then asked his neighbour, Siegfried Sassoon, who lived in the next village, whether we could loose off a few cartridges in his woods. They had become friends through a shared interest in steeplechasing, cricket and poetry and also perhaps through a shared experience of war, though my father’s had ...”

“... is the war of the private infantryman, as against the subalterns’ war of Owen or Grenfell, Sassoon or Blunden or Graves. Because he is not of the officer class, he feels no responsibility for the horror, hence no guilt about it, and so his revulsion from it is manageable. He is nearer to David Jones; one ‘soldiers on’. His revulsion and protest ...”

“... 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 understand the ...”

“... a clever bugger but he can’t sing.’ Coward blamed the microphone for making him sound like Donald Duck and the humidity for putting his piano out of tune. But as the tour went on he got into his stride and the reception improved. The conditions did not. He slept in bamboo huts, keeping one eye out for snakes, witnessed the rudimentary medical care ...”

“... he wasn’t praising him for any Eliotic or iconoclastic talents, which is part of the reason for Donald Davie’s complaint a few years later that Hardy represented ‘a crucial selling short of the poetic vocation, for himself and his successors’. The Larkin-Davie standoff oversimplifies matters, as Robert Lowell intimated when he said that the two poets ...”

“... Schapiro. On arrival, he trashed his hotel room and was beaten up by the police while waiting for Donald Dike, a colleague from the English department, to bail him out. Shortly afterwards he travelled to Washington for a poetry festival; again he smashed up his hotel room, again he was arrested. Victoria was too young to sign the papers for his release and ...”