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“... keep men’s spirits within bounds, Where too dull duties keep in monotonous rounds. That is Ivor Gurney in about 1922, and lest there be any mistaking the near-desperation to build with whatever is to hand, the lines come from the heart of a group of poems terrible with the mutilations and death-chambering of the Somme, where as it happens both ...”

“... to ruin, Whose friend was God, but God swore not to aid me! – and the, to me, unknown poem by Ivor Gurney, addressed to God, which he wrote in Barnwood Mental Hospital, as much as a portrayal of what used to be done to patients in the name of sanity as of the insanity itself: Why have you made life so intolerable And set me between four walls, where ...”

“... The Britons discussed are notably comical or vulnerable men of talent (Boswell and Corvo, Ivor Gurney and Evelyn Waugh), men whom an American can patronise a little. Graham Greene does not appear here, since Paul Fussell is suspicious of him. Greene is inclined to patronise Americans: he is one of those over-subtle Europeans, like Nabokov, to be ...”

“... 20th century is undergoing a reassessment – Ethel Smyth, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, John Ireland, Ivor Gurney and Rebecca Clarke are all gracing stages once again, and established historical narratives are being upended by new scholarship on their lives and works. Delius, in all his messiness, belongs to the same ...”

“... reminiscent of the Georgians and, indeed, there are a couple of references to Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney. When he is not referring to a timeless landscape and noting the effects of the seasons, he is describing medieval buildings or people from another time.‘Durham in March’, for instance, which sees the landscape from a moving train, records ...”

“... founding of the Royal College of Music in 1882 onwards. Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth and Ivor Gurney studied there, and all were to produce song-cycles from A Shropshire Lad, as did John Ireland. The appeal of the poems lay partly in their concision and surface simplicity of rhythm and metre, their lack of figurative recesses, their closed forms ...”

“... had left behind were inseparably his. The burden he carried was in some respects tolerable. Like Ivor Gurney and Isaac Rosenberg, he had fought an infantryman’s war rather than the subaltern war of Owen or Sassoon or Blunden or Graves. Instead of postwar assimilation and adjustment, there was a steady distillation of the private’s worldview; and if ...”

“... subalterns and monocled mutineers. I read Michael Hurd’s desolating biography – The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney – on the train to Edinburgh, the city where the nerve-wracked composer, on his way to insanity and death, was hospitalised after being gassed in 1917. I stared at the few surviving pictures of him: the one in a private’s tunic (2nd/5th ...”