Listings for Reader:
Vera Brittain
Click here to select all entries:
: popular novels
"Vera Brittain's far from bookish home contained, in addition to the yellow-back novels which formed the main staple of her early reading, a volume entitled Household Medicine: 'the treatment of infectious diseases left me cold, but I was secretly excited at the prospect of menstruation; I also found the details of confinement quite enthralling.' She added the knowledge thus gained to other sources, recalling 'that intensive searching for obstetrical details through the Bible and such school-library novels as David Copperfield and Adam Bede which appears to have been customary almost everywhere among the adolescents of my generation.'"
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
: Household Medicine
"Vera Brittain's far from bookish home contained, in addition to the yellow-back novels which formed the main staple of her early reading, a volume entitled Household Medicine: 'the treatment of infectious diseases left me cold, but I was secretly excited at the prospect of menstruation; I also found the details of confinement quite enthralling.' She added the knowledge thus gained to other sources, recalling 'that intensive searching for obstetrical details through the Bible and such school-library novels as David Copperfield and Adam Bede which appears to have been customary almost everywhere among the adolescents of my generation.'"
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
: The Bible
"Vera Brittain's far from bookish home contained, in addition to the yellow-back novels which formed the main staple of her early reading, a volume entitled Household Medicine: 'the treatment of infectious diseases left me cold, but I was secretly excited at the prospect of menstruation; I also found the details of confinement quite enthralling.' She added the knowledge thus gained to other sources, recalling 'that intensive searching for obstetrical details through the Bible and such school-library novels as David Copperfield and Adam Bede which appears to have been customary almost everywhere among the adolescents of my generation.'"
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Charles Dickens : David Copperfield
"Vera Brittain's far from bookish home contained, in addition to the yellow-back novels which formed the main staple of her early reading, a volume entitled Household Medicine: 'the treatment of infectious diseases left me cold, but I was secretly excited at the prospect of menstruation; I also found the details of confinement quite enthralling.' She added the knowledge thus gained to other sources, recalling 'that intensive searching for obstetrical details through the Bible and such school-library novels as David Copperfield and Adam Bede which appears to have been customary almost everywhere among the adolescents of my generation.'"
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
George Eliot : Adam Bede
"Vera Brittain's far from bookish home contained, in addition to the yellow-back novels which formed the main staple of her early reading, a volume entitled Household Medicine: 'the treatment of infectious diseases left me cold, but I was secretly excited at the prospect of menstruation; I also found the details of confinement quite enthralling.' She added the knowledge thus gained to other sources, recalling 'that intensive searching for obstetrical details through the Bible and such school-library novels as David Copperfield and Adam Bede which appears to have been customary almost everywhere among the adolescents of my generation.'"
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
: newspapers
'Her encouragement even prevailed upon us to read the newspapers, which were then quite unusual adjuncts to teaching in girls' private schools.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
Percy Bysshe Shelley : Adonais
'During Preparation one wild autumn evening in St Monica's gymnasium, when the wind shook the unsubstantial walls and a tiny crescent of moon, glimpsed through a skylight in the roof, scudded in and out of the flying clouds, I first read Shelley's "Adonais", which taught me in the most startling and impressive fashion of my childhood's experience to perceive beauty embodied in literature, and made me finally determine to become the writer that I had dreamed of being ever since I was seven years old.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Unknown
Mary Ward : Robert Elsmere
'Had I realised when I read it that its author was even then portentously engaged in rallying the anti-suffrage forces, it might have influenced me less, but I remained ignorant until some years later of Mrs. Ward's political machinations, and her book converted me from an unquestioning if somewhat indifferent church-goer into an anxiously interrogative agnostic.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Olive Schreiner : Woman and Labour
'To Olive Schreiner's "Woman and Labour" - that "Bible of the Woman's Movement" which sounded to the world of 1911 as insistent and inspiring as a trumpet-call summoning the faithful to a vital crusade - was due my final acceptance of feminism.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Oscar Wilde : plays
'Yet when the War broke out, I did not clearly understand what was meant by homosexuality, incest or sodomy, and was puzzled by the shadow that clung to the name of Oscar Wilde, whose plays I discovered in 1913 and read with a rapturous delight in their epigrams.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Unknown
George Eliot : Romola
'My desultory and totally unorganised reading of George Eliot, Thackeray, Mrs Gaskell, Carlyle, Emerson and Merejkowski made little impression upon this routine, though their writings offered occasional compensation for its utter futility. "The reading of 'Romola,'" enthusiastically records my diary for April 27th, 1913, "has left me in a state of exultation!"'
UnknownCentury: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain
Olive Schreiner : The Story of an African Farm
'During the next few weeks I spent a good many troubled, speculative, exciting hours with the little volume clasped in my hands.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Andrew Lang : Andrew Lang's Fairy Books
'In spite of my vague memories of the South African campaigns, Spion Kop and Magersfontein were hardly more real to me than the battles between giants and mortals in the Andrew Lang fairy-tale books that I began to read soon afterwards.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
George Eliot : Daniel Deronda
'Uneasily I recalled a passage from Daniel Deronda that I had read in comfortable detachment the year before:'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
William Wordsworth : poetry
'Perhaps, I thought, Wordsworth or Browning or Shelley would have some consolation to offer; all through the War poetry was the only form of literature that I could read for comfort, and the only kind that I ever attempted to write.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Unknown
Plato : 'Apologia' and 'Meno'
'The spasmodic study of Plato, whose "Apologia" and "Meno" I was reading for Pass Mods., certainly did nothing to discourage my hysterical pursuit of elusive definitions.'
UnknownCentury: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain
William Wordsworth : unknown
'I flung myself on my bed afterwards and tried to get some comfort from the volume of Wordsworth which had been the delight of my scholarship work in that long-ago that was already beginning to be labelled "pre-war".
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
: The Times
'By way of compensating him for my heretical indifference to the loveliness of Greek - a loveliness that came back to me in quieter days, more potent than life, more permanent than war - I enclosed with my letter the cutting of a recent "Times" leader which had encouraged me to hope for the future resurrection of pre-war literary values.' [In the next sentence Vera Brittain states that the Times leader was called "The Unsubmerged City".]
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
various : The Times History of the War
'Together Edward and I looked at "The Times History of the War", picked out a newspaper paragraph stating that the total estimate of European war casualities was already five million dead and seven million wounded, and studied with care the first official account of Neuve Chapelle.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
W. E. Henley : Bric-a-Brac
'To console myself, I concluded, I had been re-reading one of our favourite fragments from W. E. Henley's "Bric-a-Brac":
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Thomas Hardy : Tess of the D'Urbervilles
'Sometimes when I think ... of the Dream-city, with its grey towers and autumn sunsets, and the little room where surrounded by books I used to read "Tess of the D'Urbervilles before a glowing fire at twelve o'clock at night, I can only cry inwardly: "I [italics] hate [end italics] nursing! How tired I am of this War - will it never end!"'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book, Unknown
: The Times
'After following the progress of the new Allied expedition to Salonika, and studying with mixed feelings the competitive journalistic outbursts over the shooting of Nurse Cavell, the three of us read, rather sadly, in "The Times" of October 15th, the customary account of the opening of the Michaelmas term at Oxford, and speculated whether we should ever again see as students the grey walls clothed in their scarlet robes of autumn creeper.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper, Unknown
Johan August Strindberg : unknown
'Once, in the midst of trying to read a Strindberg play, I felt ghostly fingers gently stirring my hair, and twice mysterious footsteps walked slowly up the ward, stopped opposite my table and never returned.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Unknown
Robert Hugh Benson : Vexilla Regis
'In my wooden hut, by means of a folding card-table and a remnant of black satin for tablecloth, I made a small shrine for a few of the books that Roland and I had admired and read together. "The Story of an African Farm" was there and "The Poems of Paul Verlaine", as well as "The Garden of Kama" and "Pecheur d'Islande". To these I added Robert Hugh Benson's Prayer Book, "Vexilla Regis", not only in honour of Roland's Catholicism, but because my mother had sent me some lines, which I frequently read and cried over, from Benson's "Prayer after a Crushing Bereavement":'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
: newspaper
'Although, during those noisy, monotonous weeks, I had at last time to read the newspapers, with their perturbing accounts of the Easter Rebellion in Ireland, and Townshend's surrender at Kut, and the first stages of Roger Casement's progress towards his execution in August, there was still more than enough opportunity for thoughts about the past.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: the 'Star' newspaper
'A boy thrust a "Star" into my hand, and, shivering with cold in the hot sunshine, I made myself read it.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: newspaper
'The leisurely life on this surgical block left plenty of time for reading the various newspapers sent to me from England.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
John Masefield : Gallipoli
'Often, when my incompetent needle refused, as it has always refused throughout my life, to collaborate with my intentions, the kimono was abandoned for such scanty literature as I had collected from home - Thomas Hardy's poems, John Masefield's "Gallipoli", numerous copies of "Blackwood's Magazine", and the recently published Report of the Commission on the Dardanelles.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Serial / periodical, magazines
Thomas Hardy : In Time of the Breaking of Nations
'A verse from Thomas Hardy's "In time of the Breaking of Nations" floated into my mind from the volume of his poems that Edward had sent me in Malta: "Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch grass: Yet this will go onwards the same Though Dynasties pass."'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Gilbert Frankau : The City of Fear
'As the winter grew colder and colder I spent the deep trough of the early hours in a huddled heap beside the stove, drinking sample bottles of liqueur from Paris-Plage out of a tin egg-cup, and reading an impressive poem called "The City of Fear" by a certain Captain Gilbert Frankau, who had not then begun to dissipate his rather exciting talents upon the romances of cigar merchants:'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
: The Times
'The magazines, when more demanding than the "Tatler", still belonged to the Conservative variety, such as the weekly "Times", the "Spectator" and "Blackwood's", so that my impression of the winter's most significant events - the Bolshevik November coup d'etat two months after the proclamation of the Russian Republic, and the final act at Brest Litovsk on March 2nd, 1918, following the complete collapse of the Russian armies - was inevitably onesided.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: Report by the Joint War Committee of the British Red Cross Society and Order of St. John
'Only a short time ago, sitting in the elegant offices of the British Red Cross Society in Grosvenor Crescent, I read in the official "Report by the Joint War Committee of the British Red Cross Society and Order of St. John" the following words - a little pompous, perhaps, like the report itself, but doubtless written with the laudable intention of reassuring the anxious nursing profession: "The V.A.D. members were not ... trained nurses; nor were they entrusted with trained nurses' work except on occasions when the emergency was so great that no other course was open."'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: official report
E.A. Mackintosh : Cha Till Maccruimein
'Not long afterwards I was reminded of this conversation by some lines from E. A. Mackintosh's "Cha Till Maccruimein," in his volume of poems "A Highland Regiment", which Roland's mother and sister had sent me for Christmas:'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Hugh Walpole : The Dark Forest
'For a day or two after the raid I felt curiously lighthearted; like the hero of Hugh Walpole's "The Dark Forest" - one of the few novels I had read that winter - "I was happy ... with a strange exultation that was unlike any emotion that I had known before. It was ... something of the happiness of danger or pain that one has dreaded and finds, in actual truth, give way before one's resolution."'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Owen Seaman : The Soul of a Nation
'Still sore and indignant, I happened one day to read some verses by Sir Owen Seaman which I found in a copy of "Punch" dated April 3rd, 1918 - the very week in which our old strongholds had fallen and the camp at Etaples had been a struggling pandemonium of ambulances, stretchers and refugee nurses:'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Serial / periodical, magazine
: The Times
'I was no better reconciled to staying at home when I read in "The Times" a few weeks after my return that the persistent German raiders had at last succeeded in their intention of smashing up the Etaples hospitals, which, with the aid of the prisoner-patients, had so satisfactorily protected the railway line for three years without further trouble or expense to the military authorities.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: The Observer
'On Sunday morning, June 16th, I opened the "Observer", which appeared to be chiefly concerned with the new offensive - for the moment at a standstill - in the Noyon-Montdidier sector of the Western Front, and instantly saw at the head of a column the paragraph for which I had looked so long and so fearfully.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: The Observer
'There followed a quotation from the correspondent of the Corriere della Sera, who described "the Austrian attack on the Italian positions in the neighbourhood of the Tonale Pass".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
Florence Nightingale : Cassandra
'For years I continued to detest the founder of modern nursing and all that she stood for - a state of mind which persisted until, quite recently, I read her essay "Cassandra" in the Appendix to Ray Strachey's "The Cause", and realised the contrast between her rebelliious spirit, her administrator's grasp of the essentials, and the bigoted narrowness of some of her successors.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Thomas Hobbes : Leviathan
'Perpetually through my head, interfering with the detached contemplation of Hobbes's "Leviathan" and Mill on "Liberty", ran a sentence from one of the Elizabethan documents: "The Queen of Scots is the mother of a gallant son, but I am a barren stock."'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Vinagradoff : The Growth of the Manor
'Are Vinagradoff on "The Growth of the Manor" and J. H. Round on "Scutage" still the authorities for this remote and difficult period, I wonder, or has some incisive and lucid writer at last let in light on its tangled obscurity?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book, Unknown
George Bernard Shaw : Back to Methuselah
'Staying for a fortnight with Miss Heath Jones in Cornwall - where I read aloud to her a large selection of the works of Bernard Shaw, including the newly published "Back to Methuselah", but otherwise had plenty of time for reminiscent meditation - I realised that the past two years at Oxford were going to take a good deal of getting over; they had meant an effort so great that I had not calculated its cost until it was finished.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Unknown
unknown : The Evolution of World Peace
'But during my convalescence the reading of a newly published selection of internationalist essays, entitled "The Evolution of World Peace," restored to me that sense of the cause's momentous dignity...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Unknown
Hugh Walpole : The Cathedral
'John Buchan was there, brisk and unpretentious, and the bluff and cordial Hugh Walpole, over whose new novel, "The Cathedral", I was to laugh and weep so rapturously in the next few months.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
F.S. Marvin : unknown
'But at least, through my work at Oxford and my subsequent reading of F. S. Marvin and Gilbert Murray and H. G. Wells, I had come to realise history as the whole story of man's development from the cave to comparative civilisation,'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
: newspaper
'We returned to England to read, in an evening newspaper bought at Folkestone, of the death of Lord Northcliffe, but a week later another death occurred which seemed, to us who went frequently to the Union Office, far more untimely and incongruous.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: The Times
'"The Times" is exciting itself over the surplus women, as revealed by the census - 102 per 1,000, I believe, to be exact! They were quite nice to us in a leading article today, and said that women who had lost their husbands or lovers in the War couldn't be expected on that account to relegate themselves to perpetual widowhood or spinsterhood.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
Rebecca West : The Judge
'It was at this meeting, where she was one of the speakers, that I first saw Rebecca West, whose novel "The Judge", which had recently been published, I had read with a disturbed and passionate interest.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
W.N.P. Barbellion : unknown
'Yesterday I read bits of Barbellion, whose life seemd to be filled, like mine, with rejected manuscripts.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Thomas Carlyle : Past and Present
'My first vague realisation that poverty was the result of humanity's incompetence, and not an inviolable law of nature, had come with the sixteen-year-old reading of Carlyle's "Past and Present",'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Elizabeth Gaskell : Life of Charlotte Bronte
'So I turned, as often, for help and advice to Mrs.Gaskell's "Life of Charlotte Bronte", which Winifred and I had read and admired together.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Winifred Holtby : Harking Back to Long Ago
'In a short vignette called "Harking Back to Long Ago", Winifred describes how she and Grace, aged four and six and a half, lay awake on Christmas Eve gazing through the square uncurtained window at the frosty constellations of the winter stars.'
UnknownCentury: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain
Mary Ward : Robert Elsmere
'Just after leaving school, I had been plunged into the same tumult of agonised inquiry by reading Mrs. Humphry Ward's "Robert Elsmere".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book, Unknown
Olive Schreiner : unknown
'During my schooldays, which coincided with the dramatic climax of the suffrage movement, I had read Olive Schreiner and followed the militant campaigns with the excitement of a sympathetic spectator, but my growing consciousness that women suffered from remediable injustices was due less to the movement for the vote than to my early environment with its complacent acceptance of female subordination.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Unknown
Winifred Holtby : Good Housekeeping magazine "How to Enjoy Bad Health"
'But it was in a "Good Housekeeping" article on "How to Enjoy Bad Health" that she quoted the remarks with which he prefaced his announcement that she could not hope to live for more than two years.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Serial / periodical
: Punch
'I stayed behind in the waiting-room, reading a favourable review in "Punch" of Phyllis Bentley's newly published novel , "Inheritance", which Winifred had voted "magnificent," and never dreamed that sentence of death was being passed upon her behind the closed door.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Serial / periodical
Winifred Holtby : Virginia Woolf
'In some respects this little work of criticism is the profoundest of Winifred's books.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
: Harper's Magazine
'Shortly after we arrived, a writer in "Harper's Magazine" inquired, "Is this a Christian land?" and went on to comment regretfully: "Many of us seem almost hopelessly enamoured of a religion that is little better than a sanctified commercialism....Self-interest bulks large as the fuel which makes the present economic machine go."'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Serial / periodical
Bruce Bliven : Current History
'But in "Current History" for September, Bruce Bliven, an editor of "The New Statesman", ventured upon a prophecy: "An active progressive movement is needed as it has never been before.... Such a progressive movement may not play a part in the national campaign in 1928 or 1932, but when it finally comes it will amount to something!"'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Serial / periodical
Radclyffe Hall : The Well of Loneliness
'November brought a peculiar police-court case, which made literary history, after Radclyffe Hall's novel, "The Well of Loneliness", had been suppressed for impropriety. I had reviewed this earnest and harmless story on publication, and now joined the thirty-nine "expert" witnesses who appeared before the Bow Street magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Winston Churchill : The Gathering Storm
'Winston Churchill had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Baldwin Government of 1924, which now, after five years of office, sought re-election. In "The Gathering Storm", Churchill describes this administration as "a capable sedate government".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Storm Jameson : No Time Like the Present
'I had hesitated, knowing that "The New Statesman" and "The Week-end Review" regarded each other as rivals; two days later I agreed to write the notice, and subsequently reviewed a number of well-known books which included Storm Jameson's autobiographical "No Time Like the Present".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Raymond Swing : Harper's Magazine
'In puzzled words Raymond Gram Swing commented in "Harper's Magazine" on "the complete refusal of the British public to face the serious facts of their decline", while Harold Laski sustained this verdict by writing in "The Forum" on Britain's "prevailing temper of depression" and "widespread fatalism".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Serial / periodical
Winifred Holtby : South Riding
'Not until I read the fictitious account of this consultation four years afterwards in "South Riding" did I realise that the diagnosis then given her amounted to a verdict of early death, which she understood and accepted.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Phyllis Bentley : Inheritance
'Phyliis's novel, "Inheritance", had become the fiction-star of that spring.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
: [books on war topics]
'After reading these books, I began to ask: "Why should these young men have the war to themselves? Didn't women have their war as well?"
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Herbert George Wells : Modern Utopia
'My diary for October 5th, 1932, recorded the impression made upon me by the writer whose "Modern Utopia" had been a beacon light of my schooldays:'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
: The Times
'As he left Frankfort the passengers in the train were discussing the break-up of the Disarmament Conference, and in London a "Times" editorial reproved the Fuhrer like an outraged schoolmaster upbraiding a recalcitrant pupil.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
H. N. Brailsford : The New Clarion
'"We face a choice of evils," H. N. Brailsford had written in "The New Clarion" after the break-up of the Disarmament Conference.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
anon : Fascists at Olympia
'Shortly afterwards Victor Gollancz issued a pamphlet, entitled "Fascists at Olympia", which contained statements from eye-witnesses, vistims of assault, and doctors who attended the injured.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow : New England Tragedies
'Only recently I discovered its origin in Longfellow's "New England Tragedies", read and re-read during my childhood when Longfellow and Matthew Arnold were the only poets in the parental library.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Winifred Holtby : South Riding
'At the time of her death I had read only part of "South Riding", which was to bring her back to me, and I found no reason to change the words which I had written in my notebook as she lay dying.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: typescript
Herbert George Wells : The Outline of History
'They could no more accept it than they or any other powerful nation had ever accepted the teaching of his Master and Friend - for "to take him seriously", as H.G. Wells wrote of "this Galilean" in "The Outline of History", "was to enter upon a strange and alarming life, to abandon habits, to control instincts and impulses, to essay an incredible happiness...."'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Julien Benda : La Trahison des Clercs
[Whether this contains evidence of any particular reading experience is unclear] 'Presumably these writers had never read the French critic Julien Benda, who nine years earlier had prophesied in a famous book, "La Trahison des Clercs", that mankind was heading for the greatest war which the world had ever experienced.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
: Article entitled "Pacifist Beats Churchill in Glasgow U. Election", in the Chicago Sunday Tribune (24 October 1937)
'Under the caption "Pacifist Beats Churchill in Glasgow U. Election", it told me that on the previous day Dick Sheppard had been chosen as Lord Rector, polling 538 votes to Churchill's 281.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
Compton Mackenzie : Guy and Pauline
'At a P.E.N. dinner I sat beside him, and questioned him about the "lighted door" in his novel "Guy and Pauline".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Romain Rolland : Declaration of the Independence of the Mind
'Years afterwards, I was to discover the "Declaration of the Independence of the Mind" issued to his fellow brain-workers by the French writer, Romain Rolland, from Villeneuve in 1919.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Unknown
Marie Tempest : [letter published in the "Sunday "Times"]
'In the "Sunday Times" for September 12th, a letter of protest from Dame Marie Tempest had coincided with another from G., who described the contrasting practice of the Spaniards in the Civil War.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper, Unknown
Marie Tempest : [Letter published in the "Sunday Times"]
'In the "Sunday Times" for September 12th, a letter of protest from Dame Marie Tempest had coincided with another from G., who described the contrasting practice of the Spaniards in the Civil War.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper, Unknown
Oswald Garrison Villard : Inside Germany
'In a lecture at Friends' House he spoke of a new Blitzkrieg timed to start on May 1st, and designed to overthrow England in Polish fashion by the end of the summer. His series of "Daily Telegraph" articles, subsequently republished as a small book called "Inside Germany", caused a sensation by supplying chapter and verse for this prophecy.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
: Reviews in the "Observer," "Reynold's News," "Sunday Chronicle," "Yorkshire Post" and "TLS."
'Main page reviews in the "Observer", "Reynolds News" and the "Sunday Chronicle", and a warm tribute in the "Yorkshire Post" to both Winifred and the book on publication day, counteracted a colder douche from the "Times Literary Supplement".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: Il Secolo
'That night three calls from newspaper offices were put through to my bedroom; next morning the front page of "Il Secolo" carried an account of my arrival. I also read a description of my fellow train-traveller, Eve Curie, a handsome woman in her thirties whose biography of her mother had been a recent best seller.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: Courier-Journal
'Later I sent my mother a clipping from the Louisville "Courier-Journal", whose woman reporter had been present.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: Yorkshire Post
'Among 200 reviews and notices, another clipping from the "Yorkshire Post" remarked on the astonishing persistence with which Winifred remained "news" when so many writers, once dead, were forgotten.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: New York Times
'Into my mind flashed the "New York Times" headlines which I had read over breakfast that morning.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: Yorkshire Post
'In a 'Yorkshire Post' article he subsequently described his three days on Willkie's campaign train, with its eleven cars and freight of one hundred politicians, journalists, and stenographers.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: "Star Man's Diary"
'Two days afterwards I wrote to Clare during an air raid, enclosing a paragraph about her parents from the "Star Man's Diary" and a short appreciation which I had vainly sent to "The Times".
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Unknown
Virginia Woolf : The Waves
'She preferred to say - in words written ten years ago at the end of "The Waves" which might stand for her epitaph - "Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!"'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book, Unknown
Thornton Wilder : Bridge of San Luis Rey, The
'I had not known Thornton Wilder, though I had been among the thousands who read "The Bridge of San Luis Rey".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book, Unknown
John Bunyan : The Pilgrim's Progress
'"It is an hard matter," wrote John Bunyan in "The Pilgrim's Progress", "to go down into the Valley of Humiliation."'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book, Unknown
John Frederick Charles Fuller : article in the "Evening Standard"
'In the "Evening Standard", Major-General Fuller commented acidly that the gigantic forces being raised in America suggested preparation for the next war rather than this.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper, Unknown
: "Time" Magazine
'"The censorship here is so close that I depend for most of my information upon "Time" and "Life"," I wrote to New York that summer.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Serial / periodical, Unknown
Nathaniel Gubbins : comment in the "Sunday Express"
'The weary Press caustically reported a current quip: "Good news at last! Two of our generals were captured at Tobruk!" and the "Sunday Express" philosopher, Nathaniel Gubbins, produced a characteristic comment: "The worse the news is, the more we talk about what we are going to do with Germany after the war."'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
Robert Charles Kirkwood Ensor : Miniature History of the War
'According to R.C.K. Ensor's "Miniature History of the War", "the annihilating raid on Lubeck...and the raid of 1,130 bombers on Cologne...each marked an epoch" in Allied achievement.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Corder Catchpool : On Two Fronts: Letters of a Prisoner.
'His books, "On Two Fronts" and "Letters of a Prisoner", described those early experiences.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
Emanuel Miller : The Neuroses in War
'Here I read the three-year-old newspapers which described the unusual murder trial, and studied a "background" book, "The Neuroses in War", published by the Tavistock Clinic, for the psychology of my chief character.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
: [Report in the "Daily Mail"]
'At the end of October, a paragraph by the "Daily Mail" Correspondent in Lisbon "revealed" the peril which she and her fellow evacuees were fortunate to survive.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: New Statesman
'The "New Statesman" described the exponents of this policy as "Bitterenders"; their high priest was Lord Vansittart, whose propaganda seemed guaranteed to defeat the struggling German Resistance movement.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Serial / periodical
Arthur Harris : Bomber Offensive
'In a post-war record entitled "Bomber Offensive", Sir Arthur Harris himself described the ordeal of Hamburg, which caused civilian casualties variously estimated at between ten and sixty thousand.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
: National-Zeitung
'"...Women were wandering about half-crazy," stated an account in the Swiss newspaper, "National-Zeitung", and a stoker who deserted from a German ship told the Stockholm correspondent of the "Daily Telegraph": "People went mad in the shelters. ..."
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: Evening Standard
'By 1944 Lord Lang, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, was supporting the persistent protests of the Bishop of Chichester in the House of Lords, and the ageing Dean Inge predicted in an "Evening Standard" article that "when the war is over we shall be very sorry for what we have done."'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
G. S. Spinks : The Bases of Civilisation
'That autumn a friend sent me a booklet entitled "The Bases of Civilisation", by Dr. G. S. Spinks, one-time editor of the "Hibbert Journal". Reading it I found some sentences which, in the Quaker phrase, "spoke to my condition".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Booklet
: Manchester Guardian
'These included excerpts from the "News Chronicle" and "Manchester Guardian", which reported that a so-called "article" of mine on saturation bombing, supported by a signed statement from twenty-eight Protestant "leaders of opinion", had created a "furore" in the United States, and had even inspired three and a half columns of adverse criticism in the "New York Times".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
Dorothy Thompson : [article in the "Sunday Chronicle"]
'My first real understanding of the "terrific sensation" came from an article published in the "Sunday Chronicle" on March 12th by the American columnist, Dorothy Thompson. [Brittain then proceeds to quote from the article.]'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: Human Events
'About the same time a correspondent sent me a copy of "Human Events", issued weekly from Washington by Dr. Felix Morley, a former editor of the "Washington Post".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Serial / periodical
: The Times
'In 1943, soon after Britain adopted "obliteration" as a policy, an article in the "Times" reported that "the German home front morale had grown stronger"; bombing "united" and "stiffened" the German people just as the Nazi Blitzkrieg in 1940 had united and stiffened the British.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
Oswald Garrison Villard : Last Plea for Europe
'From the United States Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard, inspired by the same thought, sent me an article called "Last Plea for Europe" which he had published in "The Christian Century".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: article published in a periodical
: Evening News
'During the second week of the battle, a Letter reader sent me from that day's Evening News a clipping which contained only two headlines: CHILDREN SEE GERMANS DIE. "C'est bon," they say. "C'est bon."'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: Daily Express
'Coming up to London on the morning of September 8th, I read with the same happiness as my neighbours a "Daily Express" article by Duncan Sandys, M.P., the chairman of the War Cabinet committee on operational counter-measures against the flying bomb.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: The Stars and Stripes
'On May 5th the U.S. Forces' newspaper, "The Stars and Stripes", quoted a description by British war prisoners of this fourteen-hour attack.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
: Jewish Chronicle
'A letter in the "Jewish Chronicle" subsequently assailed Victor for publishing and commending "Above All Nations".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
Victor Gollancz : What Buchenwald Really Means
'Within the next few days I read a new Gollancz pamphlet, "What Buchenwald Really Means".
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain
Victor Gollancz : article in the "Left News"
'In the "Left News" for July, 1944, Victor had also published a document from Underground France on the future of Germany.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Serial / periodical
Victor Gollancz : Article in the "Left News"
'In the "Left News" for July, 1944, Victor had also published a document from Underground France on the future of Germany.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Serial / periodical
Thomas Hobbes : Leviathan
'They could all, I thought, have been summed up by the glum description of barbarism in the book called "Leviathan" by the seventeenth-century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
S. L. Solon : Article in the "News Chronicle"
On March 14th the "News Chronicle's" correspondent, S. L. Solon, had called Cologne "End-of-the-World City".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
Anne Matheson : Article in the "Evening Standard"
'To the "Evening Standard" Anne Matheson had contributed a later and similar description of Nuremberg.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
George Orwell : Article in "The Observer"
'Even George Orwell, who had dismissed "Seed of Chaos" with contempt the previous year, now expressed deep misgivings in "The Observer" for April 8th.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Newspaper
Howard Spring : Article in "St Martin's Review"
'But the real clue had been given by Howard Spring in an unpretentious article which appeared in "St. Martin's Review", the monthly magazine of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, for September 1942.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Serial / periodical
Somerset Maugham : A Christmas Holiday
'More stimulating was the reading of Somerset Maugham's short novel, "A Christmas Holiday".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
John Ruskin : Sesame and Lilies
'I recalled Ruskin's words in the Preface to "Sesame and Lilies": "Let heart-sickness pass beyond a certain point and the heart loses its life for ever."'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
John Steinbeck : The Moon is Down
'Several Norwegians spoke critically to me of John Steinbeck's recent novel, "The Moon is Down".'
