Bernard Bergonzi considers the poetry and fiction of two World Wars, including discussions of Wilfred Owen, Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, Pat Barker’s Regeneration, and the poetry of the Desert War of the 1940s. The second section deals with a number of prominent twentieth-century authors. Among other subjects, it looks at Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier as a novel anticipating the Great War, the treatment of memory in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and aspects of the poetry of T.S. Eliot, responding to arguments about its anti-semitism. The final section is on Catholic writers, from Hopkins and Chesterton to Graham Greene and David Lodge

Writers and War: Regeneration:
Pat Barker’s trilogy;
Poets’ novels: Richard Aldington and H.D.;
The Great War and modern criticism;
Poetry of the Desert War;
Drummond Allison, 1921–43;
Roy Fuller in wartime;
Modern Masters: Fresh Wells;
Fiction and history: Ford’s The Good Soldier;
Aldous Huxley and Aunt Mary;
Eliot’s cities;
Eliot, Julius and the Jews;
Time and memory in Nineteen Eighty-Four;
Catholics: Hopkins the Englishman;
Hopkins, tradition and the individual talent; T
he other Mrs Ward; Chesterton’s first novel;
David Jones and the idea of Art;
Graham Greene at eighty;
A conversation with David Lodge;
Index.