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 [...]
October 21, 2009 – 11:24 am
I’ve a letter printed in this week’s Times Literary Supplement, adding to Bernard Bergonzi’s article last week about the D.H.Lawrence’s use of the Meynell family in England, My England (a subject that I have written about in this blog).
My letter (which you can read by clicking here) is about the way readers might have read [...]
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 [...]
Today I took at look at Love on Leave (1919), which I had seen referred to as a novel by the much-maligned Jessie Pope, and it turned out not to be a novel after all.
It is a book of short stories, and all the ones I read were love stories. (I could only manage so [...]
In the anonymous Billet Notes in Nash’s Magazine, 1916, two lines of verse are quoted. The context is a discussion of journalistic exaggeration and fakery:
I am rather fed up with this Angels of Mons business, which the cheap papers are exploiting. It’s too much like the bathos they indulged in during the early stages of [...]
The Saturday Westminster Gazette (Sep 19, 1914) text of Arnold Bennett’s The White Feather is more or less the same as that published in the American Collier’s a month later, but there is one puzzle.
The unpleasant young lady who hands the hero a feather at the end of the tale says (in the Westminster):
“That’s all [...]
I looked at some 1914 editions of the Saturday Westminster Gazette last week, while chasing up the first printing of Arnold Bennett’s The White Feather. I found enough of interest there to make me want to look at some later copies.
Yesterday I chose the second half of 1916 to dip into, partly because I wanted [...]
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 [...]
At the weekend I was chatting on the phone with John Shapcott, who is organising the upcoming Arnold Bennett conference in Stoke, which looks as though it will be excellent. He made a passing reference to a story by Bennett called The White Feather. I have made a small collection of white feather stories, but [...]
February 25, 2009 – 11:53 pm
Thinking about gentleman burglars, I reckoned it might be a good idea to look at how Raffles, the model for the postwar gents that I am interested in, was first presented to the public. I therefore took a look at Cassell’s Magazine for June 1898.
This contains the first Raffles story, ‘The Ides of March’ , [...]
