Carol Anne Duffy is a good poet, and the Laureateship seems to have given her a new lease of poetic life. She has just released a new poem, marking the deaths of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch; it has a strong central idea – a war film played backwards:
Last Post Carol Ann Duffy
In all my [...]
A while ago I bought a 1916 copy of Horatio Bottomley’s John Bull magazine from the table of oddments outside one of the second-hand booksellers in Cecil Court, just off the Charing Cross Road. It was well worth the couple of quid I paid for it, if only as evidence against those who claim that [...]
The subject of last night’s Who Do You Think You Are? was Chris Moyles, a radio presenter notable for presenting crassness as though it were wit. The programme was quite interesting, though, as he traced his family back to the grimmest slums in Dublin. Of his great-grandmother’s fifteen children, only five survived.
Moyles’s great-grandfather was a [...]
Alan Hewer of Great War Dust Jackets alerted me to this intriguing title, so I thought I’d take a look at the book, which is very definitely a curiosity.
The Major’s peculiarity is that he becomes invisible – not in the normal way that senior officers often disappeared from the trenches when times got rough, but [...]
Siegfried Sassoon’s Sherston trilogy more or less single-handedly invented the idea of the Great War as the catastrophic disruption of an idyllic Edwardian age. Pretty well all previous fiction of the twenties sees things quite differently, with the pre-war period as troubled and conflicted, and the War, though terrible, offering the potential, sometimes not realised, [...]
Douglas Jerrold is a writer who interests me greatly. I’m increasingly convinced that he is definitely the author of A Few Things you can do with One Arm, though I’ve no clinching evidence yet.
I’ve taken a look at his 1927 history of the Royal Naval Division, and it’s an odd mixture of styles. Parts of [...]
Very sad news today, that Henry Allingham has died at the magnificent age of 113. The BBC account is here.
He was a sailor, and then an airman, and not only survived the Battle of Jutland, but also saw Passchendaele. According to the Daily Telegraph:
The scenes he witnessed of soldiers waiting to go over the top [...]
Thanks to Alan Hewer of Great War Dust Jackets for pointing me in the direction of a Punch review of the Jessie Pope stories I’ve mentioned recently. Here it is – and a pretty just assessment, too.
Love–on Leave (PEARSON) is the sufficiently expressive title that Miss JESSIE POPE has chosen for a small book of [...]
I’ve just get hold of the third box-set in the Forbidden Hollywood DVD series. The six films in this pack are all by William Wellman, the toughest of the tough guy directors. And if you want to know how tough he was, watch the biographical documentary on the fourth disc of the set. Once, when [...]
I read several stories from Jessie Pope’s Love – On Leave in the library yesterday, but copied another likely-looking one for future reference and enjoyment. It’s called Boy Blue, and I think it’s my favourite.
The heroine is Hazel Harwood, who ‘possessed good looks, good humour, and a very impressionable heart’. ‘Impressionable’ is definitely the word [...]
