The weekend’s literary pages sounded the Last Post in honour of Remembrance Sunday. The re-release of Sir Andrew Motion’s collection of war poems, Laurels and Donkeys, is being feted by critics. And Motion read from the book at a party in Oxford on Friday night, a memorable experience for those who witnessed it.
The former Poet Laureate also took part in a discussion about new war literature for the Guardian, together with Michael Morpurgo and Luisa Young. The events of the Great War have now, for the most part, passed out of living memory and into history. The challenge for writers and historians, say those interviewed by the Guardian, is to preserve the sentiment of Remembrance Day: to honour those killed in war, even if one cannot sympathise with the cause in which they died. To that end, 13 national libraries in Europe have collaborated to make their enormous war archives available online.
In a similar vein, the Telegraph’s Toby Clements has reviewed
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