More on the enigmatic Siegfried "Mad Jack" Sassoon in this article in the Guardian. It is of course a good thing that Sassoon's papers look likely to stay in the country but I don't often get excited about such archives. They must only cause excitement in hard-core scholars of the person concerned. I suppose I might like scouring Ted Hughes' papers for signs of the lost Sylvia Plath journal but that would be literary groupyism (nice word - I shall use it again). Sassoon and Owen were indeed the real thing when it came to war poetry. Moving as some of the stuff by other poets was, Sassoon and Owen's words both celebrate the bravery and recognise the stupidity of the war they fought in.This links nicely with Logicomix which uses the device of a lecture given at an American University by Bertrand Russell (a pacifist who had been jailed during WWI for his campaigning against the war) on the day Britain declared war on Germany in 1939 to describe his life story. Russell was claimed as their own by US isolationists who said that America should stay out of the war. However, and I have yet to read the final section, I think he actually came out in favour of the declaration which must have caused a riot. Final report hopefully tomorrow.
I'm not sure what the next book will be - I'm not sure whether to class Logicomix as light relief or heavy learning so it's not clear whether I need a palate-cleanser or a weighty tome. Comment me up!
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