London Review of Books

Nonetheless

John Bayley, 2 February 1989

The Lost Voices of World War One: An International Anthology of Writers, Poets and Playwrights
edited by Tim Cross.
Bloomsbury, 406 pp., £12.95, November 1988, 0 7475 0276 5Show More

Poems
by Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger.
Anvil, 350 pp., £15.95, January 1989, 0 85646 198 9Show More

Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War Two Aviator
by Samuel Hynes.
Bloomsbury, 270 pp., £13.95, November 1988, 0 7475 0333 8Show More

“... heroicaly in action on the Isonzo front in August 1915, wrote in his diary a week before that ‘war becomes like life itself. It’s all there is: not a passion any more nor a hope. Like life, rather sad and resigned, it wears a tired face, seamed and worn, similar to our own.’ All over Europe young men were finding out much the same thing, but this ...”

Bowling along

Kitty Hauser: The motorist who first saw England, 17 March 2005

In Search of H.V. Morton
by Michael Bartholomew.
Methuen, 248 pp., £18.99, April 2004, 0 413 77138 5Show More

“... and timeless England. It is a quest to find in reality the England that existed as myth for a war-ravaged generation; the village at dusk, smelling of woodsmoke, surrounded by green fields; the thatched cottages and rambling gardens; the time-worn historical monuments. This was the land ‘worth fighting for’ in the propaganda of both world wars. That ...”

A Babylonian Touch

Susan Pedersen: Weimar in Britain, 6 November 2008

‘We Danced All Night’: A Social History of Britain between the Wars
by Martin Pugh.
Bodley Head, 495 pp., £20, July 2008, 978 0 224 07698 2Show More

“... the social ladder: while only 10 per cent of houses were owner-occupied before the First World War, by 1939 that figure was around a third. Those new homes, moreover, were more modern and comfortable, with indoor bathrooms (finally), running water and gardens. The expansion of the national grid meant they were electrified as well; indeed, by 1939, 75 per ...”

Mr Dug-out and His Lady

Helen McCarthy: Woman’s Kingdom, 19 November 2020

Endell Street: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran World War One’s Most Remarkable Military Hospital
by Wendy Moore.
Atlantic, 376 pp., £17.99, April, 978 1 78649 584 6Show More

“... a reform they had played no small part in bringing about. The eyecatching and well-publicised war service performed by British women over the previous four years had slowly recast the suffrage debate. Patriotic displays of civic duty – from making munitions to tilling the land – made demands for equal citizenship hard to resist; the needs of the ...”

The Myth of 1940

Angus Calder, 16 October 1980

Collar the lot! How Britain Interned and Expelled its Wartime Refugees
by Peter Gillman and Leni Gillman.
Quartet, 334 pp., £8.95, May 1980, 0 7043 2244 7Show More

A Bespattered Page? The Internment of ‘His Majesty’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens’
by Ronald Stent.
Deutsch, 282 pp., £7.95, July 1980, 0 233 97246 3Show More

“... incomparably more urgent, organising internment on this scale distracted Cabinet, Home Office and War Office. Troops were tied down guarding harmless aliens at a time when Dad’s Army was nightly expecting invasion. Highly skilled refugees whose talents would have enhanced Britain’s war effort wistfully stared at barbed ...”

Newfangled Inner Worlds

Adam Phillips: Malingering, 3 March 2005

Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War
by Peter Barham.
Yale, 451 pp., £19.99, August 2004, 0 300 10379 4Show More

“... to help him find out what it is. If the ‘actor’ was a serviceman invalided out of the Great War for ‘lunacy’, as it was then called, and the audience was a psychiatric profession that believed, as most German doctors and many of their British colleagues apparently did, that, in Peter Barham’s words, ‘the so-called ...”

Stamford Hill to Aldgate

Daniel Trilling, 16 November 2023

Chapters of Accidents: A Writer’s Memoir
by Alexander Baron.
Vallentine Mitchell, 363 pp., £16.96, September 2022, 978 1 80371 029 7Show More

“... Boas rents a room in a street of terraced houses that were once occupied by ‘superior working-class families, who kept them in beautiful condition’, but which have now been turned into bedsits. By the 1960s, Hackney’s Jewish community is fading: some, like Boas’s sister who married well and lives in Finchley, have prospered and moved on, while the ...”

Desire

Raymond Williams, 17 April 1986

Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives
by Carolyn Steedman.
Virago, 164 pp., £3.95, April 1986, 0 86068 559 4Show More

“... This form has been especially important in our own period because of the preoccupations of class. There has been a demand for accounts of class formation and class transition supported by the substance of individual experience. Even the strangest of us, within this form, can be ...”

Coups

Ronald Fraser, 16 July 1981

Modern Spain 1875-1980
by Raymond Carr.
Oxford, 201 pp., £7.50, March 1981, 0 19 215828 7Show More

“... history setting out to repeat itself as tragedy. Over the last hundred years three major ruling-class crises have shaped Spanish history. Each of these, including the present one, has of necessity involved the economically-dominant classes in trying to find new means to legitimise their continued domination in the face of the growing strength of the social ...”

The People Must Be Paid

Paul Smith: Capital cities in World War I, 7 May 1998

Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914-1919
edited by Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert.
Cambridge, 622 pp., £60, March 1997, 0 521 57171 5Show More

“... The war that broke out in 1914 was the first in which highly industrialised and urbanised states were to be found on both sides, and industrial muscle and urban stamina counted for as much as military professionalism, conscript grit and peasant stoicism. How far urban stamina could be relied on was not the least of the questions troubling nationalists in the years before the war ...”

Taking back America

Anatol Lieven: The right-wing backlash, 2 December 2004

What’s the Matter with America? The Resistible Rise of the American Right
by Thomas Frank.
Secker, 306 pp., £12, September 2004, 0 436 20539 4Show More

“... attitudes to sex and caste are often combined, among the newly educated Hindu middle class, with deep religious faith, and this faith is often associated with Hindu nationalist politics. Indian businessmen have contributed something like $350 million to support the rebuilding of the temple of Ram on the site of a demolished mosque in the town of ...”

He wants me no more

Tessa Hadley: Pamela Hansford Johnson, 21 January 2016

Pamela Hansford Johnson: Her Life, Works and Times
by Wendy Pollard.
Shepheard-Walwyn, 500 pp., £25, October 2014, 978 0 85683 298 7Show More

“... gives us privileged entry into the textures and flavours of a vanished time, the nuances of its class structure and language. You might have guessed that a girl in the 1920s and early 1930s could have ‘a topping time’ and be ‘divinely happy’, that things could be ‘jolly nice’, or that she had scared ‘the cat into fits’ – but not that at ...”

Invalided home

Dinah Birch, 21 October 1993

The Eye in the Door
by Pat Barker.
Viking, 280 pp., £14.99, September 1993, 0 670 84414 4Show More

“... Working-class memory generated Pat Barker’s writing. Her early fiction presented itself as a tribute to generations of suffering and survival in the industrial North-East of England. It seemed to fall into a ready-made tradition: ‘the grit, the humour, the reality of working-class life’, Virago burbled cheerfully about Union Street (1982 ...”

Scrum down

Paul Smith, 14 November 1996

Making Men: Rugby and Masculine Identity
edited by John Nauright and Timothy Chandler.
Cass, 260 pp., £35, April 1996, 0 7146 4637 7Show More

“... the virtues conducive to victory. But it was obvious to those who found the message of the Boer War not in the ultimate triumph but in the series of miserable fiascos which had scarred the early stages of the conflict, that the sporting spirit was not enough. Lord Rosebery, presenting the FA Cup in 1897, might assert that football helped bring out those ...”

From The Blog

The Engagement in the Hindu Kush

Philip Oltermann, 8 December 2010

“... Those who should hear, they hear no more, Destroyed is the army that went to war, With thirteen thousand their trek began, Only one came back from Afghanistan. These lines weren’t written by Andrew Motion or Carol Ann Duffy but by the 19th-century German novelist and poet Theodor Fontane. Between 1855 and 1859 he was the Prussian ministry’s foreign correspondent in London: he found himself increasingly frustrated by the local fondness for drinking and dancing (‘Music, as many have pointed out, is England’s Achilles heel’) and the class system (‘England and Germany relate to one another like form and content ...”

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