Mr Sterling Sticks It Out
During the Great War, a work of fiction had to be pretty extreme to attract the attention of the authorities, who had their work cut out regulating the Press (and were sometimes criticised for only dealing with the London papers, and letting the provincial press go more or less unchecked). A pacifist novel like Theodora Wilson-Wilson’s The Last Weapon of 1916 could be published by C.W.Daniel, the Tolstoyan publisher, without being prosecuted. (This is a work of religious pacifism, and gets very allegorical, but contains a very strong chapter depicting a soldier who has returned from the front, where he has done terrible things. He angrily confronts the minis

Shooting Prisoners
When Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed was published in 1930 it aroused much criticism in Canada, partly because of the hero’s relationship with a prostitute, which I mentioned yesterday. One critic deplored the representation of the Canadian soldier as a coarse-minded, profane creature, seeking only the solace of loose women or the courage of strong liquor [....] On the whole, such literature, offered to our avid youth, is an irrevocable insult to those gallant men who lie in French and Belgian graves. Even more sensitive was the issue of

Canadians and Prostitutes
(Book covers courtesy of Alan Hewer’s excellent Great War Dust Jackets site) In

Big Steamers
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

Shouting at the Telly
I rather like Andrew Marr’s Making of Modern Britain series on BBC2. It’s punchy tabloid history, simplified here and there (especially about social class, I think) but conveying sound basic historical information in a clear and engaging way. Or at least, Marr’s script does that. The use of archive film, though, in this week’s episode, had me shouting at the telly, like the nerd I am. It was all over the place. Bits were actual documentary, though often they didn’t fit in with what they were supposed to show. The programme made the classic mistake, for exampl