On forgiveness

For all the calumny so regularly and indiscriminately heaped on it by Conservative commentators, the BBC does sometimes earn its keep. For instance, by accident this afternoon, washing up after lunch and half-listening to the news, I stumbled over this, in which BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner interviews Lord Tebbit on the occasion of the [...]

On Richard Overy’s ‘The Morbid Age’

The research, erudition, earnestness and effort that went into Richard Overy’s The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars might well have made up three or four striking and worthwhile books. Instead Overy has given a single volume, 521 pages long, in many ways highly unsatisfactory.
In The Morbid Age, Overy seeks to demonstrate that in Britain [...]

Not the typical Roman holiday …

To compensate for this unprecedented and rather depressing run of two ‘parish news’ posts in a row — and also, admittedly, because while everyone else of any consequence is clearly now on holiday, I’m still here in London — let’s turn our attention, however briefly, to far horizons, judged either geographically or chronologically — specifically, [...]

Salutary truth: ‘War and Medicine’ at the Wellcome Collection

It’s hard to know exactly what to say about the current exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, War and Medicine, except that after worrying about it for several days — worrying about the way in which going around the exhibition reduced me to unfamiliar near-speechlessness — I’ve concluded that this is, in fact, indication less of [...]

Land girls in Lymington: war art fights back

Fresh from visiting Lymington to see an exhibition exploring contemporary images of the Women’s Land Army, Bunny Smedley goes on the warpath in defence of British war art, past and present.

‘Saved for the nation’: General Wolfe will stay in London

Schaak’s portrait of General Wolfe has been ’saved for the nation’, in a week where five British servicemen died in Afghanistan.

On rebuilding the Bucintoro

Flashy patriotic gesturing on the part of assertive yet less-than-independent statelets is rarely a good thing: at best it comes across as crass and faintly risible, while at worst, these first notes of a comic-sounding overture presage not some entertaining opera buffa, but rather tragedy following the usual script of material destruction, fratricidal violence and [...]

Not crying Wolfe: that rare thing, art that should be saved for the nation

Most of us retain, shelved away somewhere in our innermost being, a lexicon of clichéd phrases absolutely guaranteed, no matter why or in what context they are uttered, to produce instant, categorical, irreversible disagreement. Mine probably opens automatically at the phrase ‘a work of art that must be saved for the nation’ — and if [...]

Flashman and The Unmentionable Memoir

George MacDonald Fraser died this week. On the evidence of his published obituaries, Fraser’s sole claim to fame was his creation of the Flashman novels, a dozen of them in all, published between 1969 and 2005.
There was, needless to say, more to Fraser than Flashman, although one can see why the broadsheets and BBC might [...]

Journey’s End at the Comedy Theatre, London

It is hard to imagine anyone writing a play like Journey’s End today — and for good reason. R. C. Sherriff, the author, had seen active service in the First World War (he was a captain in the East Surrey Regiment), and the play was finished in 1928, only a decade after the events depicted [...]