George Simmers reports here the appeal by the Rupert Brooke society to raise enough money to buy a painting by Brooke's inamorata (well, one of them), Phyllis Gardner (far left). And, here, George picks up on my blogpost denouncing the AQA GCSE syllabus , this time to point out that its prose is as bad as its poetry: 'The AQA policy seems to be that teenagers should be protected from difficult, troubling literature.' We can't have impressionable minds subjected to Kipling's sadistic masterpiece, 'Mary Postgate'.Gists and Piths I discovered relatively recently. Here it is on Bernard Bergonzi and war poetry, here on books by Nicholas Murray and Harry Ricketts, here on Daniel Swift's Bomber County, here on Ted Hughes's 'Griefs for Dead Soldiers', and here on 'the trouble with war poetry'.