Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, ‘Vox Populi’ (1880): A New, Annotated Translation
Get PDFJean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, Comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–1889) first published ‘Vox Populi’, the short text translated here, in the magazine L’Étoile française during December 1880. He republished it in La Comédie humaine a year later, before gathering it into the collection Contes cruels, published by Calmann Lévy in February 1883.
It appears there as the third story in the collection and the editors of the Pléiade edition suggest this positioning was intended to signal the variety of forms deployed across the collection as a whole. For this work is more frequently referred to as a poem in prose, rather than a ‘conte’ or story. As well as its brevity, ‘Vox Populi’ is characterised by a set of repeating motifs and phrases. At the heart of its narrative lies the beggar’s cry: ‘Please, take pity on a poor blind man!’, which is repeated six times in the course of the text. (One biographer suggests that the story was inspired by an actual encounter with one such beggar in Paris.) But Villiers also repeats (with variations) references to the setting and Parisian crowds, as ‘Vox Populi’ surveys key political developments between 1868 and 1880. The interplay of difference and repetition at these points measures the cowardice and fickleness of the general population in Paris as they respond with fear or enthusiasm to each successive change of regime.
 
Review: Walter Pater, The Collected Works of Walter Pater Vol. IV: Gaston de Latour, ed. by Gerald Monsman (Oxford University Press, 2019)
Get PDFGerald Monsman’s edition (2019) of Pater’s final and unfinished novel Gaston de Latour is one of the initial two volumes (the other being Lene Østermark-Johansen’s edition of Imaginary Portraits) to be published in the new Oxford University Press Collected Works of Walter Pater, with Lesley Higgins and David Latham as General Editors. Along with Marius the Epicurean (1885), Pater’s earlier novel of first-century Rome, Gaston de Latour was apparently intended to be part of a projected trilogy with each novel located in a different historical era. Gaston is set in sixteenth-century France in the years after the Reformation, and its eponymous hero is an observer whose meditative consciousness soaks up the religious, intellectual, moral, and aesthetic atmosphere of his age. He comes into contact with many of the period’s significant figures: Pierre de Ronsard, leader of the Pléiade school of poetry, the philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne, the Italian Dominican friar and thinker Giordano Bruno, Queen Marguerite, wife of Henry of Navarre III (later Henry IV of France), and Henry himself
Michael James Nugent, A Long Week in March: The 36th (Ulster) Division in the German Spring Offensive, March 1918
Get PDFA ‘Lack of Moral Fibre’ in Royal Air Force Bomber Command and Popular Culture
Get PDFRoyal Air Force aircrew endured mental and physical stresses during bombing operations. Their chances of completing a tour of operations unscathed were around one in four, and many were aware the chances were slim. Some who refused to fly were accused of ‘lacking moral fibre’ (LMF). Although this was not a medical diagnosis it is frequently viewed through the lens of mental health and reactions to trauma and it has become a powerful and important cultural phenomenon. This article re-examines LMF in the culture of the wartime Royal Air Force, before considering how and why LMF is remembered by veterans and in popular histories since the war
The Forgotten Chindits – 23 British Infantry Brigade
Get PDFIn March 1944 Japan launched its Operation U Go offensive which resulted in the well documented battles of Kohima and Imphal in north east India. At the same time 23 British Infantry Brigade was finalising Long Range Penetration training before participation in Operation Thursday, the second Chindit campaign that was already underway in north eastern Burma. That plan was changed, and the brigade was diverted to operate in the mountainous Naga Hills to protect the eastern flank of Kohima and disrupt Japanese supply lines from Burma. Much has been written about Burma, Kohima, Imphal and the two Chindit operations, but surprisingly little on the activities of 23 British Infantry Brigade in 1944. This article seeks to redress some of that imbalance by considering: how the brigade prepared for the Long Range Penetration role; how it operated in the Naga Hills; how those operations differed to Operation Thursday; and finally, if this was an effective use of the brigade
Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry and Joanne Begiato, (eds.), Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and imagining the military in the long nineteenth century
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Aubrey Beardsley, H. S. Nichols, and the Decadent Archive
Get PDFThe spring of 1919 in New York must have been an exciting time and place for devotees of the work of the decadent British artist Aubrey Beardsley. On 20th March of that year, the Anderson Galleries, a prominent auction house, held a sale of original Beardsley drawings formerly in the collection of Frederick H. Evans. Evans, a British photographer, had been Beardsley’s friend, and the artist responsible for the famous portrait photograph of Beardsley posing with his head held in his long, tapering fingers. The sale, which had been preceded by an exhibition, proved that the appetite for Beardsley’s work had only grown in the 21 years since the artist’s death; one drawing was reported to have sold for the tidy sum of $630 – an unequivocal sign that, among art collectors at least, ’nineties decadence could still command a robust market
British Newsreels at War, 1939-45: A Significant Source for Scholars
Get PDFSubject to wartime restrictions, the five British commercial newsreel companies continued to produce cinema newsreels throughout the Second World War. This article summarises the voluntary and compulsory censorship arrangements for newsreel content and the rota system for filming to indicate how the Ministry of Information and the Services implicitly and explicitly controlled wartime newsreel production. As the unrivalled form of mass-communication of visual news media during the period, the newsreels contributed significantly to British wartime propaganda, and the purpose of the article is to argue for the value of the wartime newsreels as a source for scholars of the conflict