August 26, 2008 – 10:03 am
There is a resounding article by Viv Groskop in today’s Guardian about the suffragette play at the National Theatre. I saw a preview last month, and registered my disappointment in a blog post – it seemed to me a play that unwarrantably simplified history and avoided all the difficult issues about the suffragette movement.
When [...]
August 23, 2008 – 3:35 pm
“The General’s a cheery old fellow. An indifferent general, I understand. But that’s a normal condition of British generals, apparently.”
That sentence suddenly appears as an offhand comment in The Deductions of Colonel Gore (1924) a rather run-of-the-mill detective story by Lynn Brock.
Surely it’s an echo of Siegfried Sassoon’s poem, ‘The General’:
“He’s a cheery old [...]
August 21, 2008 – 5:15 pm
A few weeks ago I read Bruce Graeme’s Blackshirt (1925), about an ex-officer who after the war feels starved of excitement, and becomes a dashing gentleman burglar, clothed all in black.
That book ends with a very definite closure – Blackshirt reformed, and married to the girl who had been acting as his conscience. There didn’t [...]
August 20, 2008 – 12:28 pm
Here’s a strange one, from a Chips comic of 1918:
A man with a secret identity as a giant bat, with a operating from a spectacular hidden cave full of astonishing equipment…
I’m sure that Bob Kane and Bill Finger really do deserve all the credit for the Batman comics – but maybe, just maybe they had [...]
August 19, 2008 – 11:46 am
Recent novelists writing about the Great War have been very fond of military executions. For popular moralists like Michael Morpurgo, the figure of the deserter shot at dawn is the perfect symbol of class oppression and an unjust war.
I am more interested in earlier novels containing executions, which are often given a very different [...]
August 17, 2008 – 7:47 am
The Imperial War Museum in Lambeth has put details online of the big new exhibition (opening 30th September) to mark the 90th anniversary of the Armistice.
It looks as though there will be plenty about stories of individuals, as well as exhibitions of artwork and ephemera, and a section about the founding of the museum.
It looks [...]
August 14, 2008 – 9:00 pm
During the war, Douglas Goldring had roused much controversy with his novel The Fortune, which shows an officer becoming disillusioned with the war, under the influence of his sceptical friend.
In 1920, he published another pacifist novel, The Black Curtain, and I spent an interesting few hours in the Bodleian Library today, reading it.
The novel (like [...]
August 9, 2008 – 10:14 am
I’ve just received a copy of the first issue of the Wilfred Owen Association Journal. (It used to be the Newsletter, but it has been re-christened and re-launched, complete with ISSN number.)
The Journal contains some interesting biographical snippets and a guide to Owen’s Edinburgh that I shall definitely make use of as and when I [...]
The “Enoch Arden” theme was a popular one in the early twenties. Tennyson’s poem tells of a sailor returning after a long absence during which he had been presumed dead, and finding his wife re-married. Tennyson resolved the story with much spiritual nobility, and so did many twenties writers.
There’s a story by Olive Wadsley, in [...]
In thrillers of the twenties, there are remarkably few German villains around. Writers like John Buchan deliberately introduced “good” Germans into their stories, and others presented the Germans as misled by a few evil men.
An exception is The Return of Clubfoot (1922), by Valentine Williams. During the war, Williams had invented the character of Dr [...]
