The changing face of battle

On War and Writing by Samuel Hynes is hardly about war at all. There is little about combat here, or the actual business of fighting and killing — what Shakespeare wryly called ‘the fire-eyed maid of smoky war/ All hot and bleeding’. Hynes is an august scholar of English literature and particularly the literature of 20th-century warfare. But he also served as a bomber pilot in the Pacific during the second world war, and has written an engaging, plain-spoken memoir of his service called Flights of Passage, published in 1988. His two vocations, he explains in the introduction to his new book, are ‘professor’ and ‘pilot’, and here the professor not the pilot is at the controls.

This is a collection of essays and reviews, including a short account of his experiences working as an adviser for a TV series about the second world war, and some criticism of the war poetry of Thomas Hardy, W.B.