November 25, 2009 – 6:54 pm
During the Great War, a work of fiction had to be pretty extreme to attract the attention of the authorities, who had their work cut out regulating the Press (and were sometimes criticised for only dealing with the London papers, and letting the provincial press go more or less unchecked). A pacifist novel like Theodora [...]
November 22, 2009 – 12:09 pm
When Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed was published in 1930 it aroused much criticism in Canada, partly because of the hero’s relationship with a prostitute, which I mentioned yesterday. One critic deplored the representation of the Canadian soldier as
a coarse-minded, profane creature, seeking only the solace of loose women or [...]
November 21, 2009 – 1:03 pm
(Book covers courtesy of Alan Hewer’s excellent Great War Dust Jackets site)
In a recent post on Arnold Bennett’s The Pretty Lady, I quoted the 1917 parliamentary debate on prostitution and its effect of the soldiers. During this, Col Sir Hamar Greenwood reflected on the scandal of seven thousand ‘clean Canadian boys’ needing venereal treatment [...]
November 17, 2009 – 11:37 am
The new Fringes of the Fleet CD has arrived from Amazon, and very satisfactory it is, too. It has Elgar’s settings of Kipling’s poem-cycle, of course (with a version of the sinister Tin Fish that should get anyone’s neck-hairs tingling), but there are also instrumental pieces by John Ansell and Haydn Wood and a setting [...]
November 16, 2009 – 12:17 pm
I rather like Andrew Marr’s Making of Modern Britain series on BBC2. It’s punchy tabloid history, simplified here and there (especially about social class, I think) but conveying sound basic historical information in a clear and engaging way.
Or at least, Marr’s script does that. The use of archive film, though, in this week’s episode, had [...]
November 11, 2009 – 6:32 pm
In 2002, Ben Shephard wrote A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914 -1994. This is a work of serious history, examining a wide range of sources and attempting to get beyond conventional ideas about war neuroses. He looks at these in their historical context, in a way that illuminates the behaviour both of soldiers [...]
November 11, 2009 – 11:24 am
Thanks to Brian Busby, who pointed me in the direction of All Else is Folly, by Peregrine Acland. Abebooks found me a reasonably-priced copy, which arrived this morning.
I probably won’t read the novel for a while, but I have already taken a look at the introduction, by Ford Madox Ford. In this he does [...]
November 9, 2009 – 6:10 pm
An interesting story from War Illustrated of June 24, 1916 , attested as true by a soldier stationed on a farm in France:
The men there often heard a sound as of a falling shell, not followed by the burst, and they concluded that the shell must be a ‘dud’. But one day, sitting in the [...]
November 4, 2009 – 9:30 am
There’s an article in today’s Guardian about the excellent news that the National Heritage Memorial Fund has allocated £550,000 to ensure that Siegfried Sassoon’s archive stays in this country.
The only downside to this is that the Guardian has appealed to the usual suspects for quotations, and some of these are a bit off-target. Andrew Motion, [...]
November 3, 2009 – 12:17 pm
The Pretty Lady (Churnet Valley Books, £14.95. ISBN 1904546689)
John Shapcott’s excellent new edition of The Pretty Lady raises the question why this extraordinary book has not been generally recognised as one of the most original and penetrating twentieth-century novels. Even Bennett enthusiasts like John Carey and John Lucas have been a bit sniffy about it. [...]
