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“... absurdly impertinent, suspiciously like the unwisdom of hindsight. In his fine edition R.K.R. Thornton excludes letters dated later than the end of 1922, when Gurney was transferred to the City of London Mental Hospital in Dartford, on the grounds that they would require a second volume and he does not wish to reinforce the idea of Gurney as the ‘mad ...”

“... of Nineties studies, contributes a valuable essay on the important magazines of the time. R.K.R. Thornton, in another good essay, points out that the term was less available after the trial of Oscar Wilde: Symons planned a book called The Decadent Movement in Literature, but when it appeared in 1899 it was called The Symbolist Movement instead, and it ...”

“... is, by and large, the author only of the less consequential poems. Partly this is because R.K.R. Thornton, working on a limited budget, chose reasonably enough to represent only the soldier, the Gurney who was yet to write the poems by which he has a claim on us. In fact, the Gurney who writes from the trenches still thinks of himself as musician first, poet ...”

“... collection was scattered. By a complicated process, involving much research outside the archive, Thornton and Walter claim to have reassembled the papers distributed by Blunden, Joy Finzi and others and, accepting Gurney’s description, have published them as 80 Poems or So. An introduction and textual backnotes detail this considerable piece of detective ...”