[9] Another description of his appearance a year or so later described him as "a small blond boy with a cherubic soprano's face, an incongruously deep and hollow voice, and a deliberate, sententious manner; he seemed about sixteen".
[11][12][13] During July the Spanish Civil War broke out, and on 2 August, acting on official advice, the entire household left Majorca aboard a British destroyer.
[15][16] Before long he decided to return to Spain to work for the beleaguered Socialist government, despite himself being a lifelong Conservative, but Riding told him he must stay in England.
[24][25] In June Riding, Graves, the Hodges and two more of the coterie travelled to Rennes in Brittany and found a large country house, which they rented and moved into.
[26] A year later the entire party took ship for America, where an old friend of Graves, the journalist Tom Matthews, had engaged to find them a home.
By now the dynamic of the Hodge marriage had completely changed, both coming to suspect that theirs was more a friendship than a romance, while Beryl and Graves had gradually fallen in love with each other.
[27][28] On arriving in England Hodge immediately set out on a journalistic assignment to Poland, and was in Warsaw when the German army invaded the country.
The evidence was mainly drawn from ephemeral sources, such as newspapers, magazines and radio broadcasts, and the book depicted British life in this period as being mainly devoted to frivolities and distractions.
[38] Press reviews had some very enthusiastic things to say: "thoroughly good reading",[39] "swift, ironic, entertaining...fair and penetrating and a thoroughly significant book today",[40] "it could hardly have been better done".
[41] More recently it has been described as "stimulating and well-informed",[42] and by Francis Wheen as "enthralling",[43] while for the historian Alfred F. Havighurst "nothing has as yet replaced" it as a social history of the period.
[46] Originally intended to help Graves's daughter Jenny Nicholson, it was eventually published as The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose.
[48] Getting copyright waivers from each of the 54 writers made demands on the co-authors' time, and since this section was, in Graves's words, "dynamite under so many chairs", also on their diplomacy.
[56] The Spectator wryly noted that "this book, with its high standards, its scholarship and its brilliance, is exactly calculated to suit the contemporary taste for spiced and potted knowledge which it deplores".
This is the deleterious opinion to which The Reader Over Your Shoulder provides a welcome corrective"; he ended, "as a result of having read [it]...I have taken about three times as long to write this review as is normal, and still dread committing it to print".
[61] The biographer Miranda Seymour said that "as a handbook to style, it has never been bettered",[45] and the literary critic Denis Donoghue wrote, "I don't know any other book in which expository prose is read so seriously, carefully, helpfully.
[64][65][66] The Times Literary Supplement thought Hodge's poems showed "an ironic humour...enriched by a spontaneous vivacity and a sympathetic closeness to nature".
Hodge spent the Second World War at the Ministry of Information, where he served first under Sir Harold Nicolson,[69] then as Assistant Private Secretary to his successor, Brendan Bracken.
[77] He also produced for Hamish Hamilton two translations from the French, Maigret's Mistake by Georges Simenon (later reprinted by Penguin) and Caves of Adventure by Haroun Tazieff.
The intention, as A. L. Rowse later wrote, was to "bridge the gap between specialist journals, all too often unreadable by the general public, and the intelligent reader who wanted to read history".
[83][84] Later Hodge and Quennell brought in experts from a wide range of fields, including Kenneth Clark, Freya Stark, Nancy Mitford, Arthur Waley, Julian Huxley and Michael Grant.
[86][87] His brief was to produce "a lively, continuous narrative" emphasizing "famous dramatic events",[88] but getting major changes made in the text proved very difficult.
"Errors of fact were changed with courteous alacrity," according to the historian John H. Plumb; "subject to strong pressure, an adjective might or might not be pruned, but the grand design proved immutable.
Kirkus Reviews called it "a superb panoramic view of history with a somewhat misleading subtitle, for the emphasis is so largely British that the America aspects take definitely second place", The New Yorker "a more than ordinarily serious entry in a frequently trumped-up field",[99] and The Booklist and Subscription Books Bulletin "an inviting historical summary for casual reading";[100] the Times Literary Supplement found the illustrations good in themselves but inaccurately captioned,[101] the New York Herald Tribune thought that "the real past we share with the English was a broader, harsher, more dynamic and far more astonishing saga of conquest than this genteel survey suggests", The New York Times that "the luminous histories of our two peoples have not been dovetailed at all (as the title implied they would be) but rather set side by side to languish augustly in isolation from one another", but the Chicago Sunday Tribune believed that "this gallery of a pictured past is as rewarding as any the reader is likely to tour for some time".