Archive for Themes

“In 1964, three British women stepped into the role of ‘civil defence volunteers’ and entered a model shelter next to the Guildhall in York. They spent 24 hours in their miserable hollow, listening to simulated regional broadcasts beamed in from a van outside. They slept for a few hours in a specially sandbagged ‘core’ area intended to protect them against fallout, cooked a meal on a primus stove and swallowed aspirins for their headaches. After a single day they were plainly demoralised. As the Times wrote of the widely reported exercise, ‘even that basic feminine impulse to make frequent cups of tea deserted them. . .’”

Prompted by the idea of ‘rehearsal’ presented in Tracy C. Davis’ book, Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Duke 2007), I suggest a wider account of how theatrical techniques have emerged from the playhouse to shape public life and the political sphere.

‘What perspectives do the British bring to bear when they think of China? And how much of that distant land, once known as legendary Cathay, do they actually see, beyond their own prejudices…?’

Baldridge (1899-1977) was an American artist whose illustrations appeared in The Stars and Stripes, the official paper of the American Expeditionary Force, during the last year of the First World War. This drawing, which anticipates the rise of what is now called ‘Battlefield Tourism’, is reproduced from Baldridge’s fine autobiography, Time and Chance (1947) - a book that, after so many years of George Bush Junior, should be attributed to the ‘other’ America, from which we would love to hear more…

This is the long-forgotten article in which the iron curtain was first taken from the theatre and converted into a political metaphor. It was published in the London-based Suffragist magazine Jus Suffragii, Vol. 9, No. 4, 1 January 1915, p. 218. I count it among the key writings of the First World War. It can also be read - against Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and other latter-day polemicists - as an example of how secular-minded and even atheist writers may engage religious subjects without merely resorting to furious denial. An account of Vernon Lee and her article’s sources, context and influence is given in my book Iron Curtain: from stage to Cold War.

‘When I was nineteen the whole world flashed around my ears, all my false standards of values crumbled, everything that I had been sure of - the touch and quality of stone, the meaning of eating and sleeping and suffering, the texture of civilisation, all collapsed and left me in darkeness. The world no longer existed. I was dead in some nightmarish way. . .’

–Emanuel Litvinov to his younger brother Barnet, 9 July 1940.

A letter published in the Times Literary Supplement.

Over the years many people have tried to list the essential characteristics of Englishness, but what about the sense of threat and danger that so often serves to frame such lists? I wrote this article for Made in England, a website based on a collaboration between the BBC and Arts Council England and launched on 23 April 2008

‘It has to be remembered that throughout this war our men are moving in a more or less easterly direction…’

Solomon J. Solomon was a prominent Anglo-Jewish artist and portrait painter who went on to pioneer various schemes of camouflage in the First World War. It was in this letter to the editor of The Times, published on 27 January, 1915, that he first indicated the contribution that artists might make to a war in which traditional methods of concealment had been invalidated by the coming of aerial photography. Here applied to the question of military uniform, his novel recommendations are indebted to the idea of ‘countershading’ developed by the American artist Abbott H. Thayer in the earlier study, Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909). Solomon’s letter is followed by another, written by an ‘artist and big-game shot’ who signed himself ‘W.W.’, and printed two days later. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘camouflage’ did not enter English usage until 1917.

A Nazi propaganda film made in Terezin (Theresienstadt), a fortress and town in the Czech Republic where the Nazis concentrated Jewish prisoners before transporting them to Auschwitz. The director, Kurt Gerrin, was himself a prisoner. Like the rest of the cast, he was taken to Auschwitz and murdered shortly after these scenes were shot in 1944.

‘Mr. Money-Coutts evidently belongs to the “keep a bullet for the woman” school, and has no doubt shot his way out of many a tight corner among the savage nomads of Hertfordshire…’

A correspondence from The Times, London, 20 November - 2 December, 1935.