Justified surgery or pointless blood-letting?

In June 1937, Nancy Cunard, a supporter of the Republicans’ battle against Franco’s nationalists circulated a questionnaire to the writers of the time. It asked, ‘Are you for, or against, the legal government of the people of Spain?’ Inspired by Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, Jean Moorcroft Wilson and Cecil Woolf have repeated the exercise in the Gulf War of 1991 and the American-led 2003 invasion of Iraq in order to present ‘an objective record of a cross-section of the intellectual community’, which embraces both Jilly Cooper and Lord Skidelsky, by canvassing its opinions. The word ‘community’ is revealing. Writers are, like theatre ‘luvvies’, most comfortable with their own kind, including the dead. The contributors to this book conjure up the spirits of Virgil, Milton, Shelley, Byron, T.S. Eliot, Auden and Swinburne. It is a bit like pinning a tuft of the immortal Red Rum’s mane to the winner of the Grand National.