Simon Heffer
Warlords At Sea
Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany and the Winning of the Great War at Sea
By Robert K Massie
Jonathan Cape 865pp order from our bookshop
OUR MENTAL PICTURE of the Great War is dominated by the mud of Flanders, barbed wire, whizz-bangs, Tommy Atkins cheerfully swilling down cheap red wine behind the lines at Pozières and the rows upon rows of white crosses at Tyne Cot. If we do not forget that the war was also fought at sea, we expend very little consciousness on the memory of it. Nearly a million British and Empire men died on land: the losses at sea were measured in thousands. It is understandable, therefore, that the weighting should be so different between the two theatres of action.
Yet Britain was the greatest naval power in the world in 1914: and Germany the second "greatest. An arms race through the first years of the twentieth century had ensured that the Royal Navy remained ahead of its potential enemy when it came to building dreadnoughts. Any combat between the
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
'There is a difference between a doctor who writes medical treatises and a doctor who writes absurdist fiction. Do we want our heart surgeon to be an anti-realist?'
Joanna Kavenna peruses Iain Bamforth's 'Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dreambook'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trust-me-philosopher
How did Uwe Johnson, the German writer who was friends with Hannah Arendt and Max Frisch, end up living out his days in the town of Sheerness, Kent?
https://literaryreview.co.uk/estuary-german
You only have a week left to take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/