During the Cold War, US presidents often claimed that the West and the Soviet Union had never fought one another directly. This observation made sense geopolitically – the likelihood of mutually assured destruction made a nuclear conflict seem unthinkable – but it wasn’t strictly true.It was untrue because it overlooked the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War of 1918-20, which the British even more than the Americans had plenty of reasons to forget. “It was an uncomfortable business really,” recalled Christopher Bilney, who served as a seaplane pilot in the Caucasus. “A really nasty Read more ...

British anti-war films inspired by “the war that” failed “to end all wars” include Oh! What a Lovely War, The Return of the Soldier, A Month in the Country, Regeneration, Mrs Dalloway, The Trench, Testament of Youth, the different versions of Journey’s End, and Terence Davies’s haunting swansong Benediction. For simplicity of form and style in rendering the pity of war – and the war waged by officers on their men – none improves on King and Country (1964).Joseph Losey’s desolating film, which stars Dirk Bogarde and Tom Courtenay at the peak of their powers, is set in a rat-infested British Read more ...

In Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin wrote,"So life was never better than In nineteen sixty-three (Though just too late for me) – Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban And the Beatles' first LP."That might be the only point on which he and Joan Littlewood, a fellow poet, might agree, because she caught the zeitgeist and was doing iconoclastic work of her own in Stratford (emphatically not "upon Avon") with her revolutionary musical Oh What A Lovely War. Though it feels now to be something of an artefact in theatre’s archaeology, it has not lost its sting nor its Read more ...

Near the end of My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout’s prize-winning 2016 novel, a creative writing teacher tells Lucy, ‘you will only have one story […] you’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story.’ The advice might sound reductive – as though every writer is a kind of one-trick pony – but it’s meant to be reassuring, to legitimate a writer as a creature of obsession and habit. Anne Michaels’ third and most recent novel, Held, is not about the Holocaust, as her debut, Fugitive Pieces, was, but in its themes of memory, war, and personal ghosts, we see her Read more ...

School of Instructions, a book-length poem composed of six sections, is a virtuosic dance between memory and forgetting, distant tragedy and personal grief. At times, Hutchinson’s language perhaps forgets itself in its own excess. His lines are richly luminescent, never cold or monochromatic.However, criticism of this opulence, a style described by Carol Rumens as "sea-lit", disintegrates when the radiance of lines like "the cherry-magnified boy who felt keenly fractures in / his bones clicking like wings" appear. Hutchinson marries words emphatically, with a constant attention to music. His Read more ...

Terence Davies’s Benediction is a haunting but uneven biopic of the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon and a drama about the burden of incalculable loss. If sorrow and futility enshroud it, Davies leavens the bitterness with his tartest dialogue yet; the second act, much of it depicting Sassoon’s romantic disappointments in the no man’s land of the 1920s and 1930s, is a sustained comedy of exquisite bad manners – of which he is always the loverlorn, masochistic victim.The very English middle son of a wealthy Jewish merchant and his Anglo-Catholic wife, Captain Sassoon (played by Jack Lowden Read more ...

If we could keep living our life over and over again, would we get better at it? This is the premise underpinning Life After Life, the BBC’s four-part adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s novel.The story centres around Ursula Todd, as she grows up with parents Hugh and Sylvie (James McArdle and Sian Clifford) and assorted siblings in their home, Fox Corner. It’s an Edwardian rural idyll of lush gardens, the murmur of bees and teas on the lawn.But Ursula’s progress through the 20th century and through multiple versions of her life will not be plain sailing. Indeed, her first attempt at being born Read more ...

Demonstrating how much the world really can change in a very short time when things spin out of control, Swedish power-metal five-piece Sabaton’s album now seems especially tasteless. It’s also a scalpel-sharp example of how important context is to creative acts. The band have made a career of absurdly OTT story-telling songs of real world battles and those who fought them. They’re Amon Amarth for military history geeks. But when military history is actually happening in Europe in all its bloody grotesquery, The War to End All Wars doesn’t seem so appetizing.When they planned and played this Read more ...

There was no overt reference to the world outside in this concert, and yet the poignancy of its content could hardly have been clearer if it had been planned: two symphonies and a song cycle each touched by the tragedy of war.It was the launch event of RVW150, a national and international celebration of the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, stretching from this year well into next, to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth. In Manchester the Hallé and BBC Philharmonic are presenting all his symphonies in concerts over the next 11 weeks, a cycle entitled “Toward the Unknown Region”. And in the Read more ...

30 March 1924. It’s Mothering Sunday – the precursor to the modern Mother’s Day - when domestic servants are given a day off to go home and visit their mothers, leaving their country-house employers with no one to make the veal and ham pie, do the dishes or change the sheets (stained sheets are of particular importance here).Which is why young Berkshire squire and future lawyer Paul Sheringham (Josh O’Connor) is alone in the imposing family house, his parents having gone out to a lunch at a hotel in Henley, and why Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young; Shirley), an orphaned maid at a neighbouring Read more ...

Born in 1840, Thomas Hardy lived a life of in-betweens. Modern yet traditional, the son of a builder who went on to become a famous novelist, he belonged both to Dorset and London. When he died, his ashes were interred at Westminster Abbey, but his heart was buried separately alongside his first wife in the village of Stinsford in Dorset.In a lifetime that spanned the early Victorian period and the aftermath of the First World War, Hardy witnessed huge changes: the mechanisation of farming, the rapid growth of cities, the transformation of transport and communications. Claire Tomalin Read more ...

Historical fiction – perhaps all fiction – presents its authors with the problem of how to convey contextual information that is external to the plot but necessary to the reader’s understanding of it.Some authors supply an omniscient third-person narrator to plug possible gaps in historical knowledge, as in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), where Orlando sends a letter to “Mr Nicholas Greene of Clifford’s Inn” and helpful parentheses explain that “(Nick Greene was a very famous writer at that time).” Others have first-person narrators do the same job as they reflect retrospectively upon their Read more ...