December 29, 2007 – 11:57 am
The nicest Christmas presents are always the unexpected ones, and this year a kind nephew gave me Charley’s War. This looks like a graphic novel, but it’s actually a collection of episodes from a comic strip that ran in the Battle Action comic in the late seventies and eighties, following the adventures of young Charley [...]
December 28, 2007 – 12:13 am
I’ve added another paper to the pieces of longer writing listed on the left. It’s a paper I gave at Birmingham in September, linking Kipling’s character Penn in Captains Courageous with an tradition of writing about amnesia that goes back about a century earlier.
For quite a while now I’ve been interested in the subject of [...]
December 23, 2007 – 7:18 am
Wishing a merry Christmas
and a peaceful New Year
to all our readers.
(The image is from Robert Opie’s excellent 1910’s Scrapbook )
December 18, 2007 – 12:58 pm
While in Paris, I trawled a few bookshops, and found some good new history books. One of them is Claire Ferchaud, La Jeanne d’Arc de la Grande Guerre, by Jean-Yves Le Naour (Hachette 2006), which tells the story of a young woman from the Vendée (one of the most traditionally religious areas of France) who [...]
December 16, 2007 – 4:38 pm
The exhibition Amours, Guerres et Sexualité 1914-1945 is at Le Musée de l’Armée in Paris (part of Les Invalides, where you can also see Napoleon’s Tomb, though we didn’t get round to that. Next time, maybe.) It’s a wonderful collection of pictures, posters, artefacts and all sorts, showing the connections between love [...]
December 13, 2007 – 4:48 pm
I’m in Paris at the moment, and can heartily recommend the exhibition Amours, Guerres et Sexualite at Les Invalides. I’ll write more about it when I get home, but am now heading off for a large French meal…
December 10, 2007 – 9:51 pm
I’ve been reading a newish book, Peter Gay’s Modernism: The Lure of Heresy. Gay is a major cultural historian, and a biographer of Freud, and in this book he sets himself the big task of capturing the essence of modernism in just 450 pages. Since I had seriously begun to doubt that such a thing [...]
December 9, 2007 – 12:04 pm
It’s early December, so once again our little community of Arts and Humanities researchers at Brookes get together for a day of mutual edification (and occasional mutual mystification).
This time there was an overall theme of Memory – which suited me nicely, because I’ve been a bit obsessed by amnesia stories recently. Others took the theme [...]
December 7, 2007 – 2:45 pm
Jonathan Rose’s The Edwardian Temperament 1895-1919 has useful statistics about publication during the period, taken from The Publisher’s Circular, a trade journal.
I’ve taken his figures, and produced a couple of charts which show the effect of the War on fiction publishing. The numbers of titles include reprints as well as new books. I don’t know [...]
December 7, 2007 – 8:39 am
I’ve just come across a rather nice site at http://wwar1.blogspot.com/ . The site owner is publishing the letters of Henry Lamin, a private in the 9th Battalion of York & Lancaster Regiment, week by week, ninety years after they were written.
They were involved in heavy fighting near Ypres earlier this autumn, but now they [...]
