Some people are having trouble leaving comments on this blog. I ll try to sort it out. Meanwhile, Brian Busby from Canada has sent this comment on my Poppies 2025 post, which the WordPress algorithm foolishly wouldn t allow: Things are a bit different in Canada. They seem mandatory for politicians and talking heads, as if one [ ]
Walking around Huddersfield town centre yesterday morning, I spotted only six people wearing poppies. They were all very old. On television, by contrast, poppies are mandatory. A women on a panel show not wearing one was assailed by the indignant of the internet. Poor David Lammy in Parliament (who has a lot to worry about [ ]
[This is a version of the chapter I wrote for the Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War (2021) (edited by Ralf Schneider and Jane Potter).] We read some war books because of their excellence as novels, others for what they tell us about the war itself. Ernest Raymond’s Tell England, [ ]
I ve added another paper to the blog. It s based on a talk I gave a few years ago, about escape narratives in the two World Wars. It was written for a conference about Reading to Escape (organised by Shafquat Towheed of the Open University). I was thinking especially about the pleasures that the very popular [ ]
I ve just added another paper to the list on the right. It s one I delivered to an Arnold Bennett conference a few years ago. The topic of the conference was Bennett s friendships a good topic, since he had a talent for making friends and interesting acquaintances. My paper is about Bennett s friendship with the [ ]
I wrote about this for the Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War (2021) (edited by Ralf Schneider and Jane Potter), a work of pretty encyclopaedic scope. I think the was originally intended to appear in time for the War s centenary, but there were the kind of publishing problems that often [ ]
I ve neglected this blog over the past couple of years mostly because my interests have strayed away from the Great War. I still have a strong interest in popular fiction, however, and my reviews of it appear regularly on the Sheffield Hallam Reading 1900-1950 blog. I ve been looking through my old essays and papers, [ ]
I’ve had an email from a setup called Feedspot which says that Great War Fiction is ranked second among military book blogs. Which is very flattering, though a bit bothering. I’ve neglected the blog horribly over the past year, and it’s not what it was. Does that mean that other military book blogs are in [ ]
Here, from the Lyttelton Times, a New Zealand newspaper of 1911, is yet another proof of the strange side-effects of Rudyard Kipling s immense celebrity:
After I retired as a teacher, I applied to Oxford Brookes to research a Ph.D. on the prose of the Great War. They were welcoming, and I had a good and productive time there. (I was very fortunate in having Jane Potter, who had written brilliantly on Great War fiction, as one of my supervisors.) [ ]