Richard Overy
Damaged Lives
Blitz Kids: The Children’s War against Hitler
By Sean Longden
Constable 541pp £20
Here is a slice of real life that cuts across the more sanitised and detached narratives that historians, myself included, too often present as ‘proper history’. Sean Longden has gathered the memories of twenty-seven elderly men and women who were children during the Second World War and were forced to grow up fast. Their recollections, fleshed out with other memoirs and stories, recapture a tough age, when adulthood started early. These were lives mainly lived in poverty, but not impoverished; lives apparently emancipated by war, but imprisoned again in war’s callous indifference to suffering.
Longden’s Blitz kids were chosen in most cases not because they experienced the Blitz – though some did, and can recall it in visceral detail – but because they joined one or other branch of the uniformed services well before the age of eighteen. The real meat of these memories
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm