December 6, 2009 – 11:49 am
After C.W. Daniel had been convicted under DORA for publishing Despised and Rejected, the novel about homosexuals and pacifists, he received this letter:
20.X.18
Dear Mr Daniel,
As I say, I can only hope that the enormous fine inflicted on you, for no offence at all, may serve as an advert, at all events, to that book. In [...]
December 5, 2009 – 5:26 pm
I’ve been off to Amsterdam for a few days, during which time I managed to take a look at the archive of the publisher C.W. Daniel (at the International Institute of Social History there.) He was a Tolstoyan pacifist, and a brave and principled man. He went to prison in 1916 rather than pay [...]
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 [...]
August 11, 2009 – 10:07 pm
More trawling of the Manchester Guardian archive has come up with an article from November 9th, 1929, just before the B.B.C. radio Remembrance Day broadcast of Journey’s End. It casts an interesting light on current attitudes to swearing.
The article explains that ‘A certain number of pungent words contained in the play… have been excised.’ and [...]
Many people still seem to believe in the ten-year myth – the idea that books ruthlessly analysing war experience could not be written until ten years after the event. Herbert Read expressed it in a 1930 review of All Quiet:
All who had been engaged in the war, all who had lived through the war years, [...]
February 1, 2009 – 1:45 pm
This was a one-day conference organised in conjunction with the excellent War and Medicine exhibition at the Wellcome Collection. A number of speakers explored different aspects of the themes of memory and war, in ways that connected fascinatingly.
To start with, Martin Conway from Leeds gave a laid-back presentation about memory in general. He talked [...]
January 4, 2009 – 7:34 pm
Today I was reading an ancient book review from 2001 by Frank McLynn, a Professor of Literature and also a historian, and a sentence brought me up short. Discussing (and endorsing) the “futility” myth of the war, he says of Gary Sheffield, the revisionist historian:
He cannot explain why there is not a single literary production [...]
November 30, 2008 – 11:26 pm
I went to an excellent meeting in London yesterday afternoon, organised by the Society for the Study of Labour History, on the subject of New Thoughts on British War Resisters 1914-19. The meeting was in Freemason’s Hall, an imposing building in Great Queen Street, near Holborn. You’d probably recognise the main entrance if you saw [...]
November 13, 2008 – 6:18 pm
Dan Todman of Trench Fever calls her article in last week’s Guardian “Evidence that Mary Warnock is a philosopher, rather than a historian.”
Well said – except that for philosophers there is no word more important than “truth”. Yet Warnock writes:
We read truthful accounts, like Goodbye to All That, that opened our eyes to what [...]
November 11, 2008 – 10:57 am
The BBC has worked hard this November to find new ways of presenting the Remembrance theme on TV. Some worked and some didn’t.
The My Family at War series was made by the Who do You Think You Are? people, and took celebrities back to battlefields where their ancestors fought. This usually provided a pleasant mixture [...]
