Caroline Moorehead
Soldier, Soldier
The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars
By Patrick Hennessey
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 352pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
In February 2007, Literary Review published a light-hearted piece by Patrick Hennessey about setting up a reading club while serving with the British army in the southern Iraqi desert. Inspired to turn it into a book, he has produced an engaging mixture of stream of consciousness, war reportage and reflections on the nature of modern warfare, bringing to the story of Sandhurst and tours of duty in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Falklands all the gung-ho, self-mocking, fast-moving style made popular by the new generation of post-Tom Wolfe American writers. Sandhurst, as he saw it, was ‘Hogwarts with guns’; for the rest, it was mostly a question, in the words of his subtitle, of ‘killing time and fighting wars’.
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
How convincing is Anatol Lieven's perspective that 'if we are to prevail against climate change, we must adopt a Chinese perspective and concentrate on the long term', building a form of 'nationalist siege state'?
@malloch_brown weighs up the arguments.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/red-white-green
'She must pretend to be a walking companion, observe without being noticed and paint the subject from memory, in secret. It's a superb metaphor for the female artist, hidden from history.'
@nclarke14 ponders the resonance of 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portraits-of-ladies
'And there in the evening the bride and the gamekeeper
Wait with their faces averted, wait
For the signal to shift and the lamp to glow red
And a train to arrive, but not yet and not yet.'
'It Says Here', from Sean O'Brien's upcoming collection.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/it-says-here