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 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 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 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. [...]
October 26, 2009 – 10:01 am
There’s a nice little piece by John Sutherland in today’s Guardian about that 1929 competition to predict the living novelists who would still be remembered and read in 2029.
I blogged about the competition a couple of weeks ago, having come upon it in the Manchester Guardian archive by chance. (I was looking for references to [...]
October 24, 2009 – 5:03 pm
At the recent Utopian Spaces conference in Oxford, it cheered my heart to note that there were two papers on that most unjustly neglected writer, C.E.Montague. In particular, there was a paper on Montague’s 1927 novel, Right Off the Map, by Amy Cutler, who has posted it in full on her very promising new blog. [...]
October 20, 2009 – 8:52 am
A week or so back I wrote about the 1929 Manchester Guardian competition in which readers were asked to predict which living novelists would still be read in 2029. (Galsworthy came top with 1180 votes.)
The top six on readers’ lists were all men, and the highest-scoring woman writer was Sheila Kaye-Smith, with 198 votes. As [...]
October 12, 2009 – 7:16 am
On April 3rd, 1929, the Manchester Guardian printed the results of a competition that it had organised. Readers were asked to predict which living novelists would still be read in 2029, and the winner was the competitor whose list most nearly matched the general consensus.
Since we are now four-fifths of the way towards 2029, [...]
September 27, 2009 – 7:11 am
I’ve been reading (with immense enjoyment) Rose Macaulay’s 1928 novel Keeping Up Appearances. One short passage puzzles me. William is being urged to speak to the young man his daughter is engaged to, and says:
Lot of harm done by speaking, that’s what I’ve found. Too much speaking brought the Great War about, and too much [...]
