It was about that time I managed to get a job for one of those ex-officers who long after the war still found themselves at a loose end and unable to make a place for themselves in civil life, until some of them took to crime and some to despair and some to a bed-sitting-room [...]
I mentioned Sapper’s The Black Gang recently, and suggested that its hooded vigilantes might have reminded early readers not only of Mussolini’s black-shirted Fascists, but of the Ku Klux Klan whose vigilante heroes had recently become fashionable, thanks to D.W.Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Jessica questioned the word “hoods”, noting that the text [...]
I spent yesterday at the Oxford University Press, as a member of a graduate workshop about investigating publishers’ archives. It was a most enjoyable day.
We gathered in a smart conference room next to the Great Clarendon Street reception area, taking our places at a long table. In front of each chair, as well as the [...]
A while ago I read with great interest A.M.Burrage’s “Captain Dorry” stories, in which an ex-officer becomes a gentleman burglar, with the twist that his victims are the standard villains of right-wing early twenties fiction – war profiteers, corrupt trades unionists and Jews. Especially Jews.
So I was interested to read in Mike Ashley’s excellent [...]
A new film about Passchendaele should be appearing soon. It is a Canadian production; the trailer has a husky voiceover spouting dreadful clichés, but the rain and mud look authentic enough.
I like Mark Wallinger’s design for a huge horse at Ashford, but his Turner Prize bear impersonation was silly, and I’m not sure about his latest effort, for the Folkestone Triennial exhibition:
Mark Wallinger’s Folk Stones will be placed on the Leas and pays homage to the role played by Folkestone’s Road of Remembrance in the [...]
Before the war, Warwick Deeping had been a doctor who was also a prolific writer, mainly of historical fiction. He volunteered for the RAMC and served in Gallipoli, Belgium and Egypt.
During the war he continued to publish historical novels, and short stories in the magazines – some of which were simple patriotic moralities like [...]
The Telegraph reports further excavations at Fromelles, revealing British soldiers as well as Australians among the 400 bodies in the mass graves.
“Two British Army buttons, a collar fastener and a British matchbox” are all that remain to identify over two hundred British soldiers who died with the 173 Australians. The Telegraph gives an impression of [...]
A neat formulation would be that for the French the First World War was something they survived, for the British something they handled, for the Italians something they proved themselves at, for the Austrians something they lost, for the Hungarians something the Austrians lost, for the Germans something that taught them to be stronger.
That is [...]
I’ve just been watching a DVD of the 1931 film version of Waterloo Bridge, directed by James Whale a year after he made Journey’s End. It’s adapted from a play by Robert E. Sherwood; I don’t know how faithful it is, but there are long stretches of slightly stagey dialogue.
It’s the story of Myra, a [...]
