Evelyn Waugh and David Jones are not writers who seem to have much in common. The acerbic and snobbish satirist and the Welsh mystic with a deep feeling for the common soldier hardly seem to belong in the same literary universe.
So it’s quite interesting to see Waugh in 1937 enthusiastically reviewing In Parenthesis in the [...]
Since I already own the VHS version, I wan’t sure whether I should invest in the new DVD of The Battle of the Somme. I’m glad I did, though. The picture quality is crisp and clear, and finding scenes is much easier than with VHS, of course – but the main advantage is the audio.
The [...]
I’ve been greatly enjoying Survivors of a Kind, a new study of Great War memoirs by Brian Bond, who spoke at Birmingham earlier in the week.
I’ll write a fuller account of the book soon, but for now will just mention one of the picturesque details in which the book abounds.
In a chapter on the Guards, [...]
March 19, 2009 – 10:20 am
While looking for something else in the 1918-1919 volume of the National Review, I came across an article that grabbed my attention. Most of the stuff in the National Review is heavyweight military, political or historical stuff, but this was a short three-page piece explaining A Few Things You Can Do With One Arm. The [...]
March 17, 2009 – 11:32 pm
I went to the Birmingham Centre for First World War Studies this evening, to hear Brian Bond give his inaugural lecture. He has just written a book about memoirs of the Great War, and the talk drew on this material, to contrast Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Guy Chapman and Edmund Blunden.
He showed a relish for [...]
At the recent Masculine Middlebrow conference in London, an interesting question came up. Had John Buchan read Freud?
Since Buchan had a strong interest in the unconscious (think of The Three Hostages) the answer is almost certainly yes. But when did he read him? Some possible references were made to fairly late Buchan texts, and I [...]
The Masculine Middlebrow Conference at the Senate House in London was a most enjoyable two days. It’s always good to get together with people equally obsessed by literature that is off the beaten track.
Jonathan Wild started proceedings with a lucid account of how the Boer War helped to create the middlebrow reading public, turning citizens [...]
Intrigued by Helen Hamilton’s dissident verse, I called up a couple of her books from the Bodleian Library.
Napoo: A Book of War Bêtes Noires is a collection of verses that are mostly character-sketches, like The Jingo-Woman, which I quoted the other day. Some express anti-war feeling, though not all. There is an [...]
Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way was shortlisted for the Booker in 2005. It tells the story of Willie Dunne, who joins the Dublin Fusiliers in 1914 and serves with them through the war.
The story is mostly told from Willie’s viewpoint, though Barry occasionally moves into the heads of other characters, and sometimes comments explicitly [...]
I’m very glad to say that Alan Hewer’s excellent Great War Dust Jackets site is once more up and running. A week or so back I was horrified to find that it had disappeared from the Internet.
It turned out that Lycos, Alan’s Internet Service Provider, had become a victim of the recession and had closed [...]
