February 28, 2009 – 5:51 pm
Since I’ve been re-reading E.W.Hornung, I thought I might as well take a look at his war memoirs. Born in 1866, he was too old to be a soldier, but volunteered for the YMCA. His 1919 book Notes of a Camp Follower on the Western Front recounts his experiences, and there is a chapter about [...]
February 25, 2009 – 11:53 pm
Thinking about gentleman burglars, I reckoned it might be a good idea to look at how Raffles, the model for the postwar gents that I am interested in, was first presented to the public. I therefore took a look at Cassell’s Magazine for June 1898.
This contains the first Raffles story, ‘The Ides of March’ , [...]
February 24, 2009 – 5:59 pm
I’m giving a paper on Gentleman Burglars at the Masculine Middlebrow conference in London next month. I’ll mostly be concentrating on ex-soldier burglars like Burrage’s Captain Dorry and Bruce Graeme’s Blackshirt (and The Saint, who may or may not have been an ex-soldier to start with, until Leslie Charteris definitely decided he wasn’t).
Anyway, I thought [...]
February 21, 2009 – 1:28 pm
I’ve been reading Oh, My Horses: Elgar and the Great War, a collection of essays centred on the composer’s reactions to the War, but also covering some interesting general subjects, such as the changes in attitudes towards German music after war broke out.
The book comes complete with a CD of historical recordings, including the 1917 [...]
February 20, 2009 – 5:26 pm
Here’s a picture of the grandees of world cricket taking money last year from that obvious chancer Sir Allen Stanford, and apparently not bothering to ask where it came from. Now, of course, he has landed them in a financial pickle – though the people of Antigua are even worse off. Seeing the picture, [...]
February 19, 2009 – 11:19 pm
This is a good time for books about the social history of the War. I mentioned Jessica Meyer’s Men of War last week, and there is another book that I have been meaning to write about for a while. It was published last year, but I don’t think I’ve seen any reviews of it. Maybe [...]
February 17, 2009 – 11:27 am
For a little while I’ve been curious about James Hanley’s war experience, and the way it was reflected in his brutal story The German Prisoner.
I’ve therefore been looking at his 1937 “autobiographical excursion”, Broken Water. This is interesting, and fills in some details, but also raises a few questions.
It tells the story of his going [...]
February 15, 2009 – 10:12 am
John Shapcott, who is organising the annual Arnold Bennett Society conference at Stoke, has sent me this cartoon from 1917, showing Bennett and Wells as war correspondents competing at the Front.
The cartoon suits the theme of this year’s conference, which is Bennett and Wells: Their Friendship, Fiction and Films. It is co-sponsored by the H.G.Wells [...]
February 13, 2009 – 2:17 pm
“Few soldiers wrote the truth in letters home for fear of causing needless uneasiness,” declared Paul Fussell authoritatively in The Great War and Modern Memory. “if they did write the truth, it was excised by company officers, who censored all outgoing mail.”
Really? Jessica Meyer’s excellent new book, Men of War: Masculinity and the [...]
February 11, 2009 – 2:49 pm
I’d woried about the snow, but the fields got greener as I headed north to Birmingham, and after all there were no transport problems.
I gave a paper about fiction magazines during the war, making the case that if these carried propaganda, it was not because some government propaganda machine demanded it (There was no such machine at [...]
