A S H Smyth
Flak Jacket to Dust Jacket
Men at War: What Fiction Tells Us about Conflict, from The Iliad to Catch-22
By Christopher Coker
Hurst 325pp £25 order from our bookshop
My Life as a Foreign Country
By Brian Turner
Jonathan Cape 240pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
In Men at War, Christopher Coker, a professor of international relations at the LSE, picks over the last three thousand years of warfare in literature to see ‘what fiction tells us about war’s hold on the imagination of young men and the way it makes – and breaks – them’. From The Iliad to World War III, via the Napoleonic era, Dresden and Vietnam, Coker investigates five ‘personalities’ – ‘warriors’, ‘heroes’, ‘villains’, ‘survivors’ and ‘victims’ – and incorporates examples as diverse as Henry IV and Dr Strangelove, McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and the Flashman novels.
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
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings