December 23, 2009 – 12:28 pm
Sometimes you think you know a text and then discover that you don’t.
On the basis of Hitchcock’s 1948 film, I assumed that I knew Rope. Based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play, the movie shows a pair of young men who commit murder as an acte gratuite, and invite their victim’s relatives round to a party [...]
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 – 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 1, 2009 – 10:23 pm
The First World war Digital Archive has just added a lot of Edmund Blunden material – manuscripts of poems, but also letters, army notebooks and so on.
This is a particularly handy resource, since it brings together material from several sources – Queen’s College Oxford, The Harry Ransom Centre in Texas and the Blunden family archive.
The [...]
August 29, 2009 – 11:48 am
In Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Sassoon gives a memorable description of a Highland Major who lectures on ‘The Spirit of the Bayonet’ with ‘homicidal eloquence’, assisted by a Sergeant, a ‘tall sinewy machine’ who had been ‘trained to such a pitch of frightfulness that at a moment’s warning he could divest himself of all [...]
Carol Anne Duffy is a good poet, and the Laureateship seems to have given her a new lease of poetic life. She has just released a new poem, marking the deaths of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch; it has a strong central idea – a war film played backwards:
Last Post Carol Ann Duffy
In all my [...]
The subject of last night’s Who Do You Think You Are? was Chris Moyles, a radio presenter notable for presenting crassness as though it were wit. The programme was quite interesting, though, as he traced his family back to the grimmest slums in Dublin. Of his great-grandmother’s fifteen children, only five survived.
Moyles’s great-grandfather was a [...]
I read several stories from Jessie Pope’s Love – On Leave in the library yesterday, but copied another likely-looking one for future reference and enjoyment. It’s called Boy Blue, and I think it’s my favourite.
The heroine is Hazel Harwood, who ‘possessed good looks, good humour, and a very impressionable heart’. ‘Impressionable’ is definitely the word [...]
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 [...]
