‘One of England’s Broken Dolls’

Joanna Bourke, in Dismembering the Male mentions ‘a popular song’ about a maimed soldier: “A man and maiden met a month ago; She said there’s one thing I should like to know; Why aren’t you in khaki or navy blue; And fighting for your country like other men do? The man looked up and slowly […]

‘The Village’ concludes – for the time being

‘It is this obsession of futility, not any depth of sympathy or humanitarianism, which accounts for the piling up of the individual agony to so many poignant climaxes remote from the necessities or even from the incidental happenings of war [....] As for their infinite pity, nothing is easier, unfortunately, than to be bravely sympathetic […]

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 […]

Showbiz news

The Village is just the beginning, it seems. The latest centenary news is that the BBC will be marking Armistice Day next year with a five-part mini-series drama called The Great War.This will apparently follow two soldiers, one English and one German, through the War. Which is a not unreasonable idea, though potentially a bit […]

‘The Village’

I wanted to like the new BBC drama series, The Village, but tonight’s third episode was a sign of opportunities missed. It’s 1916. Women anxiously read the casualty lists and men receive all-up papers. Soldiers go round the farms requisitioning horses. The local factory-owner is going to make a lot of money from boots. Fair […]

A 1917 postcard

A joke based on the assumption that everyone would recognise these familiar hymns. The common culture has changed somewhat over the century. I suppose a modern equivalent would use pop tunes, or the names of TV shows.

‘Wodehouse in Exile’

I’m actually more fascinated by what P.G.Wodehouse did and didn’t do during the First World War than during the second, but BBC4′s version of his internment and the notorious broadcasts from Berlin was not a programme I was going to miss, if only because that excellent actor Tim Pigott-Smith was taking the part. He did […]

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 […]

Dolly Dialogues

The third volume of the T.S. Eliot letters is better-edited than the second. The biographies of correspondents seem to have been cleared of the worst howlers (though Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale is still described as the ‘first book of the Clayhanger trilogy’, which it is not). John Haffenden’s notes are useful and learned, […]

‘If Winter Comes’ – by Billy Bennett

It has been suggested that Ford’s Parade’s End owes much to the example of  A.S.M. Hutchinson’s 1921 novel If Winter Comes, an earlier book about a good man stuck in an unhappy marriage and trying to maintain his integrity in a discouraging and corrupt world.  Hutchinson’s novel was a phenomenal success and led  led to many spin-offs, […]