Nigel Jones

Too Many To Speak Of

  • Martin Gilbert, 
  • Christopher Duffy, 
  • Sidney Rogerson, 
  • Gavin Stamp

Ninety years ago, at 7.30am on Saturday, 1July 1916, a summer day whose weather, as Siegfried Sassoon wrote, was ‘of the kind commonly described as heavenly’, whistles blew along the trenches of the Somme Front. Thousands of men, encumbered by sixty pounds of kit, climbed laboriously but obediently over the top and walked into No Man’s Land and history. It was the start of ‘the Big Push’: an offensive that has become a byword for the monstrous stupidity of war. Nearly a century on, as these four books attest, the myth of the greatest battle of the Great War looms as large as ever in the British national consciousness. 

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

    • 'It would be nice to think that women will achieve equal pay in my lifetime, rather than to watch gloomily as stati… ,
    • In 1660, two of the signatories of King Charles I's death warrant fled across the Atlantic to New England. But were… ,
    • Howard Jacobson's sixteenth novel is 'a love story of sorts, one characterised not by physical desire or even conta… ,
    • 'The sudden immersion in the new and unfamiliar can lead people to write with a rare lack of self-consciousness' P… ,
    • 'Pools bend the rules. Clothes slip off, skin glistens, consciousness heightens. A dreamlike scenario unfolds' Jam… ,
    • 'Although he surely didn’t know W H Auden’s theory that every high C proclaims human freedom and our capacity to tr… ,
    • RT : With beginning tomorrow, we've uncovered a 1997 article from the archive reviewing 'Golf Dream… ,
    Follow Us