November 30, 2008 – 11:26 pm
I went to an excellent meeting in London yesterday afternoon, organised by the Society for the Study of Labour History, on the subject of New Thoughts on British War Resisters 1914-19. The meeting was in Freemason’s Hall, an imposing building in Great Queen Street, near Holborn. You’d probably recognise the main entrance if you saw [...]
November 28, 2008 – 9:29 am
I’m looking at what was published during the war books boom of the late twenties, and it strikes me that it was often those too young to have been personally involved in the war who were most eager to hammer home the message of war’s horror and futility. Evadne Price, for example, who produced the [...]
November 23, 2008 – 12:28 am
One was a repressed Engish homosexual; the other was a wacky and womanising German. They were made for each other, and this TV film charted the course of their relationship rather well.
It had a message about science and war. The professors of the University of Berlin were all busy inventing poison gas, and the English [...]
November 21, 2008 – 11:04 pm
I’ve been continuing my investigations into the reception of Journey’s End by reading Too Late to Lament, the rather egotistical memoirs of Maurice Browne, the producer who snapped the play up after its club performances, and turned it into a major international event.
Harold Monro (of the Poetry Bookshop) alerted him to the play. All the [...]
November 20, 2008 – 1:09 pm
The Middlebrow Network is an association of scholars who are interested in the sort of literature despised by Viginia Woolf. She was proud to be called a highbrow, and admired the vigour of the lowbrow – but the stuff in the middle – that was what suburban people read.
Recently there has been an increase of [...]
November 20, 2008 – 8:17 am
I used my Senior Railcard again yesterday for an Awayday to Woking, where the Surrey Records Centre has R.C.Sherriff’s archive. The centre is a very pleasant place, spacious and light, with a very pleasant staff.
I had asked for the box with Sherriff’s press cuttings, hoping to find out about the reception of Journey’s End in [...]
November 17, 2008 – 2:07 pm
A DVD arrived this morning, of the 1932 French film of Raymond Dorgeles’ 1919 novel Les Croix de Bois (Wooden Crosses). This is France’s answer to All Quiet on the Western Front, and a film I’ve wanted to see for a while.
It’s a Zone 1 DVD and apparently came out a year ago, but I’ve [...]
November 17, 2008 – 12:25 am
A Part of History is rather an odd book. It’s a collection of essays about the Great War, but I defy anyone to guess what the criteria for selection were. Some essays are strictly academic; others are chatty. Some give a detached overview; at least one is pure furious polemic. Some essays seem a bit [...]
November 13, 2008 – 6:18 pm
Dan Todman of Trench Fever calls her article in last week’s Guardian “Evidence that Mary Warnock is a philosopher, rather than a historian.”
Well said – except that for philosophers there is no word more important than “truth”. Yet Warnock writes:
We read truthful accounts, like Goodbye to All That, that opened our eyes to what [...]
November 12, 2008 – 9:58 pm
It’s always a pleasure to be alerted to interesting websites, and si I’m grateful to Jayne, who in a comment on my Remembrance TV post alerted me to a site with the transcription of Edith Appleton’s diary. Edith was a nurse throughout the war, and documented what happened to her. So far I’ve only looked [...]
