Jingling his spurs

P.N. Furbank

• Private Words: Letters and Diaries from the Second World War edited by Ronald Blythe
  Viking, 310 pp, £16.99, September 1991, ISBN 0 670 83204 9

The Second World War, writes Ronald Blythe in the Introduction to Private Worlds, precipitated the ‘last great avalanche of private correspondence’. Thanks to the Education Act of 1918, it was greatest such avalanche there had ever been, and went with the most furious appetite for books – any kind of books, but Penguins for preference – and with the greatest impulsion to try ‘writing’ in the other sense too. For dozens of good reasons, cultural as well as military, that kind of war is not going to happen again. But the letters and diaries and efforts at fiction it inspired have survived in huge quantities; and from private sources, and the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum, Ronald Blythe has assembled an expressive collage, which is at the same time a meditation – just ‘one look’ at and ‘one assessment’ of, he says, an inexhaustible subject.