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 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 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, [...]
September 4, 2009 – 5:35 am
Having done my own stint on Mr Gormley’s plinth a month ago, (nothing to with the Great War, though I did mention the nineteenth-century Afghan Wars, and quoted Kipling) I always check the site first thing in the morning, to see what has been happening.
As I write this, a young man is standing in a [...]
August 1, 2009 – 10:18 pm
The deaths of Harry Patch and Henry Allingham have brought the commentators and opinion-wallahs out in force. Simon Heffer in the Telegraph writes about the effect that Paul Fussell’s Great War and Modern Memory had on him when he read it thirty years ago, and asks:
Why was Lord Lansdowne, when he called for peace in [...]
Precise recall of factual details has long been considered an important criterion of the worth of war writing. In her biography of Sassoon, Jean Moorcroft Wilson describes how:
All Quiet on the Western Front irritated him not just because of its sensationalism, but also because it gave ‘no place names’, left ‘everything vague’ [...] He had [...]
February 19, 2009 – 11:19 pm
This is a good time for books about the social history of the War. I mentioned Jessica Meyer’s Men of War last week, and there is another book that I have been meaning to write about for a while. It was published last year, but I don’t think I’ve seen any reviews of it. Maybe [...]
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 21, 2009 – 4:17 pm
When I was in London a while back, I walked through Hyde Park, and looked at Artillery Memorial by Charles Sargeant Jagger , surely the most remarkable in London.
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 [...]
