War Centenary Wars

The Great War centenary may be over a year away, but the preliminary skirmishes are already providing entertainment. A few weeks ago a letter appeared in the Guardian, signed by a number of actors and celebrities, sternly arguing that the message of any celebrations should be firmly anti-war: We are disturbed [...] that David Cameron […]

Allan M. Laing and Bertrand Russell

I’ve blogged before about Allan M. Laing, the author of Carols of a Convict who in the 1930s and 1940s would become the monarch of the New Statesman literary competitions. Cyril Pearce (author of the excellent Comrades in Conscience) has very kindly helped me by sharing the information about Laing in his database of conscientious […]

The Time of the Armistice

I’ve been asked a question. We all know that the ceasefire came into operation at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Which would be 11 a.m. French time. What time was this in Germany?  There’s a suggestion that in Germany the War would not have stopped until 12 noon local […]

‘The Road to En-Dor’

Lieutenant H. E. Jones was part of the army that surrendered to the Turks at Kut, and was sent as prisoner to Yozgad , a bleak spot way out in the Anatolian desert. What he did there is the basis of his astonishing memoir, The Road to En-Dor (1919), which I came across last week […]

Ian Beckett’s ‘The Making of the First World War’

When I posted details of that 1918 list of Great War books, someone asked me for my own list of 100 best. Well, I’m thinking about it, but one definite candidate will be a book I’ve been reading recently, The Making of the Great War by Ian F.W. Beckett. This doesn’t aim to be a […]

Life Imitates Art

Authors of fictions about the Great War often claim that their work is rooted in some actuality or memento of the conflict. A grandfather’s memories, an interview with a veteran, a bundle of letters… In the ‘Author’s Note’ to War Horse, Michael Morpurgo wrote that he was inspired to write the book by a painting […]

130 Books about the War

I like lists of books, and I’ve found an interesting one. It was compiled in 1918, and is called  called Thirteen Ways of Looking at the War. (Why thirteen? Homage to Wallace Stevens? His ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ had been published in 1917.) It’s purely a list, with no commentary, except that […]

‘The Village’ concludes – for the time being

‘It is this obsession of futility, not any depth of sympathy or humanitarianism, which accounts for the piling up of the individual agony to so many poignant climaxes remote from the necessities or even from the incidental happenings of war [....] As for their infinite pity, nothing is easier, unfortunately, than to be bravely sympathetic […]

Leavis at War

F. R. Leavis as a member of the Friends Ambulance Unit Jessica Meyer’s talk at Leeds last week was about the Friends Ambulance Unit. She mentioned that, especially later in the War, the main work of the Unit was on the ambulance trains that took the wounded from the war zone to the channel ports. […]

Showbiz news

The Village is just the beginning, it seems. The latest centenary news is that the BBC will be marking Armistice Day next year with a five-part mini-series drama called The Great War.This will apparently follow two soldiers, one English and one German, through the War. Which is a not unreasonable idea, though potentially a bit […]