January 29, 2009 – 9:26 am
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned this exhibition as one probably worth seeing, and yesterday finally got myself along to the Wellcome Collection near Euston, which I had never visited before. Yes, tt is well worth visiting.
I was most interested in the WW1 stuff, of course, and there is plenty of it. More or [...]
January 26, 2009 – 11:36 pm
The little counter at the side of my blog today hit the 100,ooo mark. that means 100,ooo page views of posts on here, mostly by humans (I think Wordpress have a mechanism for discounting searches by Googlebots or whatever.) It’s taken two and a half years. The average is about a hundred a day. Many [...]
January 21, 2009 – 4:17 pm
When I was in London a while back, I walked through Hyde Park, and looked at Artillery Memorial by Charles Sargeant Jagger , surely the most remarkable in London.
January 21, 2009 – 8:58 am
If you watch only one film in 2009, make it Abel Gance’s J’Accuse, a film that I cannot recommend too highly.
This was an immense hit in 1919 (filling five London cinemas, including the London Pavilion, without having been submitted to the prissy British censor). Then, like most silent films, it faded from memory, but is [...]
January 20, 2009 – 7:05 pm
I’m delighted to welcome a new blog, the clearly-named War Poetry, subtitled “Essays, Reviews, Links, Opinions:This is the One-Stop Shop for all your War Poetry Needs.”
It’s run by Tim Kendall, author of the excellent Modern English War Poetry (soon to be out in paperback) and editor of the huge Oxford Handbook of British and Irish [...]
January 20, 2009 – 8:08 am
The reason I’ve not been blogging much over the past few weeks is that I haven’t been looking at much new (to me) stuff. I’m at a stage with my thesis now when I’m rewriting, improving and clarifying what I’ve written before, trying to get it into a final shape. And abridging, too. When I [...]
January 13, 2009 – 4:18 pm
The census for 1911 has just been made available online for researchers and other nosey-parkers, just a little in advance of the usual century gap before publication. The database is quite easy to use, and I’ve already located my mother and a couple of well-known writers.
I was delighted to get an email from the [...]
January 12, 2009 – 10:59 am
The website of the Wellcome Institute, on the Euston Road, gives fascinating details of its exhibition, War and Medicine.
This covers the development of military medicine from the Crimean War to the present day. The website suggests that there is plenty of WW1 material, including sections on facial reconstruction, and on “shell-shock”.
There will be [...]
January 11, 2009 – 10:34 pm
Somerset Maugham’s For Services Rendered (1932) is a grim play, and very good indeed. It shows a family disintegrating as hopes and dreams wither in the face time and experience.
There was a production at Newbury in 2007 that I should have gone to but didn’t. A page of online reviews has many calling it an [...]
January 6, 2009 – 5:08 pm
Lucy Masterman’s biography of her husband (who ran Wellington House, the centre of British propaganda distribution at the start of the War) raises many interesting questions, but this is the most intriguing.
She writes that, as well as publishing propaganda, her husband’s duties included limiting the activities of enthusiastic amateurs whose efforts might prove excessive and [...]
