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 […]

Faulks

From time to time I have a go at the Spectator literary competition. A couple of weeks ago the set task was based on the fact that Sebastian Faulks has been roped in by the Wodehouse estate to write a new Jeeves novel. We were asked to imagine the reaction of the characters on discovering […]

Lawrence’s ‘The Daughter-in-Law’

Seeing a first-rate production of The Daughter-in-Law at the Sheffield Crucible has reminded me of what a very good writer D.H.Lawrence could be before the War threw him badly off-kilter. The play was written in 1912 and its premise is simple. Luther Gascoyne, coal-miner and mother’s boy, has finally got round to marrying Minnie, a […]

Angela Brazil: ‘A Patriotic Schoolgirl’

I thought I knew what to expect from Angela Brazil’s A Patriotic Schoolgirlof 1918 – a Daisy Pulls it Off sort of flag-waver, with plucky girls unmasking spy-rings and saving the country. It isn’t quite like that. There is a spy plot of sorts, but the unravelling of it is no thanks to the heroine, […]

Gilbert Frankau before the War

My account of Gilbert Frankau’s One of Us: A Novel in Verse (1912) has now been posted on the Reading 1900-1950 site.

Another war

The Army of the Potomac: Execution of Deserters, 1863 The image of the deserter shot at dawn is one of the commonest in  popular representations of the First World War. From Michael Morpurgo to Elvis Costello to Downton Abbey, the figure of the hapless victim of the military machine has been a potent symbol of […]

Bob Bushaway

I was sad to learn of the recent death of historian Bob Bushaway, a pioneer in the study of memorialisation, and a man with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the First World War. I heard him speak at Birmingham University War Studies events, and was always impressed by his expertise and enthusiasm. Here is a video […]

An (extremely cosy) Anthem for Doomed Youth

It surely takes a lot of chutzpah (or maybe just a bit of insensitivity) to give the title Anthem for Doomed  Youth  to a light detective mystery. I came across this in Waterstone’s, and since the back cover promised a story about  ‘a tragic case of long-buried secrets’, linked to the Great WarI thought I’d […]

Pissing in boots

Hardcastle, the hero of James Lansdale Hodson’s  Grey Dawn – Red Night (1929) is a fastidious man who has worked his way out of the slums, and on enlisting finds himself among the kind of people he has been trying to get away from. He is deeply unimpressed by the manners of his fellow- recruits. […]