Caroline Moorehead

Soldier, Soldier

The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars

By

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.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • A piece of Literary Review history from way back in 1983: John Haffenden talks to the great Iris Murdoch. ,
    • Britain’s only travelling lit fest, the Garden Museum Literary Festival is heading to Houghton Hall, Norfolk, for a… ,
    • 'The 19th-century German sage is not my idea of a pleasant travel companion' goes hiking with Friedr… ,
    • If you want ideas about what to read next, sign up to our free email newsletter, and get book reviews, archive mate… ,
    • 'The heroic male nude could not, I think, be used today to signify civic pride and glory', as Michelangelo’s 'David… ,
    • 'Munch’s later works show us a man liberated from the torments that gave rise to some of the best-known early works… ,
    • 'We read from left to right and from start to finish. Or do we?' Stuart Hannabus considers the merits of reading i… ,
    Follow Us