Daniel Swift

The changing face of battle

Bombs dropped by drones have made modern warfare abstract — and courage more a question of endurance

  • On War and Writing

    Samuel Hynes

    University of Chicago Press, pp. 206

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.

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