A S H Smyth

Tag Archives: WW2

So Goode it’s bad

Friday, December 10, 2021

Forever and a Day: a James Bond novel by Anthony Horowitz (Random House Audiobooks, read by Matthew Goode, 7hrs 36mins) . Around the final Daniel Craig installment, there’s been inevitable talk of who should be the next James Bond. Well, I’ll tell you who it shouldn’t be, and that’s Matthew Goode. Three years ago, Anthony […]

Filed in Journalism, review | Also tagged Anthony Horowitz, audiobooks, Britain, cars, CIA, Corsica, fiction, food, French, German, Ian Fleming, James Bond, languages, Matthew Goode, McDonald's, MI6, Norway, Radio 3, Random House, Russians, Scots, wine, women | Comments (0)

Kreises of conscience

Saturday, August 21, 2021

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner Canongate, £16.99, pp576 . In 1928, modest young blue-collar English lecturer Mildred Fish arrives in Berlin to begin her PhD in American Literature. In the febrile, polyglot atmosphere at the […]

Filed in Journalism, review | Also tagged Adolf Hitler, America, Berlin, biography, Canongate, capitalism, Communism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, France, Goethe, Great Britain, history, Hjalmar Schacht, Jews, John Dos Passos, Joseph Goebbels, literature, Lufthansa, Mildred Harnack, non-fiction, Operation Barbarossa, Operation Walkyrie, Plötzensee Prison, propaganda, Rebecca Donner, Rebecca West, spies, Stalin, the Soviet Union, The Spectator, Theodore Dreiser, trench coats, Winsconsin | Comments (0)

My first Carr

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

On my personal discovery of eccentric English novelist (and teacher, and artist, and airman, and footballer) JL Carr, the night before what would have been his 108th birthday. — For The Critic

Filed in feature, Journalism | Also tagged Andy Miller, architecture, Backlisted, Booker Prize, books, Byron Rogers, clergymen, Colin Firth, coronavirus, education, Englishmen, football, Frank Muir, Gambia, Goldsmiths College, Guardian Fiction Prize, JL Carr, John Clare, John Mitchinson, Joseph Conrad, Kenneth Branagh, Kettering, Laurence Sterne, maps, Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Berkmann, Methodism, Nicholas Lezard, novels, painting, Penguin, publishing, Pushkin, Quince Tree Press, RAF, religion, Richard Coles, South Dakota, The Critic, Thomas Hardy, Vogue, writing, WW1, Yorkshire | Comments (0)

Selassie come home

Thursday, February 6, 2020

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste Canongate, £16.99, pp. 428 . In 1935 the troops of Benito Mussolini’s sinister-clownish Roman Empire II invaded Ethiopia, in large part out of spite for Italy’s embarrassing defeat there 40 years before. Initially largely uncontested – thanks both to emperor Haile Selassie’s desperate faith in international brotherhood and to […]

Filed in Journalism, review | Also tagged Abysinnia, Adwa, Andy McNab, Canongate, death, dragons, Ethiopia, fiction, gas, Haile Selassie, history, Homer, Italians, Maaza Mengiste, Mussolini, photography, sex, the Bible, the Derg, The Spectator, Verdi, war, women | Comments (0)

Hit and miss

Sunday, September 1, 2019

Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943 By Max Hastings William Collins £25 . By 1943, after nearly four years of war ‘ameliorated [only] by a thin gruel of successes,’ Britain and her western allies had little to boast in terms of their offensive victories; the lion’s share of the burden was very clearly being shouldered by […]

Filed in Journalism, review | Also tagged Bomber Command, Dambusters, death, engineering, film, Germany, Guy Gibson, history, Max Hastings, non-fiction, RAF, Sir Arthur Harris, Sir Charles Portal, the Commonwealth, The Oldie, war, William Collins | Comments (0)

Did The English Patient send me to Afghanistan?

Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Two nights from now, by way of (ahem) a birthday present, I will be attending a live-orchestra screening of The English Patient at the Albert Hall. I had invited an old friend, a raven-haired young lady (named in Debrett’s) of impossibly romantic tendency, who first exposed me to the film in, I’d say, about 1998 […]

Filed in correspondence, Journalism | Also tagged Academy Awards, Afghanistan, Ahmed Hassanein, air travel, American University in Cairo, anatomy, Anthony Minghella, Arabic, army, Banana Republic, bedouin, Benny Goodman, Booker Prize, books, bookshops, Brighton, Bruce Chatwin, Byron, Canada, Charing Cross Road, Christopher Hitchens, clothing, Debrett's, deserts, Dorset, Egypt, Egyptology, exploration, film, French Foreign Legion, Gabriel Yared, Geoff Dyer, Geographical, Geographical Journal, Herodotus, Hungarian, Hungary, JM Coetzee, John Ball, John Hare, Joseph Conrad, Justin Marozzi, Kensington Gore, Kristen Scott Thomas, László Almásy, London, Long Range Desert Group, Lorenz Hart, love, Michael Ondaatje, mountains, music, novels, Orientalism, Oscar Wilde, Oxford, Picador, plums, Ralph Bagnold, Ralph Fiennes, Ranulph Fiennes, Richard Bermann, Robert Twigger, Royal Albert Hall, Royal Geographical Society, Saul Kelly, Sinai, SOE, song, South Africa, the Himalayas, the Nile, The Oldie, the Sahara, the Western Desert, war, WG Sebald, William Golding, wind, women, YouTube, Zerzura | Comments (0)

Up diddly up, down diddly down

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Itchin’ for a Twitch Inn, at the Heritage weekend. — For The Oldie

Filed in correspondence, Journalism | Also tagged Battle of Britain, Douces Manor, Dunkirk, fine dining, Germans, graffiti, Guy Gibson, Heritage Open Days, Idi Amin, John Cunningham, Kent, Maidstone, North Downs, Peter Townsend, pubs, RAF, Tesco, The Beatles, The Dambusters, The Malling Society, The Oldie, Twitch Inn, West Malling, WW1 | Comments (0)

M.O.’s m.o. – or; Everybody wants to be like Mike

Thursday, June 7, 2018

A review of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight. — For The Spectator

Filed in Journalism, review | Also tagged crime, ethnography, fiction, Florence, geography, intelligence, Libya, London, memory, Michael Ondaatje, spies. Aramaic, St Lucia, The Spectator, the Thames, Trieste, writers, writing | Comments (0)

Monty’s trouble

Monday, May 28, 2018

A footsoldier’s review of Antony Beevor’s Arnhem: the Battle for the Bridges, 1944. — For The Oldie

Filed in Journalism, review | Also tagged 1st Airborne Division, Allied Expeditionary Force, Antony Beevor, army, Arnhem, books, Britishness, engineering, Field Marshal Montgomery, Flanders, General Bradley, General Eisenhower, General Patton, Germans, history, Holland, Nijmegen, non-fiction, Operation Market Garden, paratroopers, Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld, the Dutch, The Oldie, the Schutzstaffel, the Wehrmacht | Comments (0)

NEWS AT A GLANCE

Monday, November 27, 2017

. In the United Kingdom 200 out of every million persons are employed as writers or editors. — The Nelson Evening Mail, April 2 1907 . No-one has been found in a major search along the Torridge. ‘Pog mahone’ means ‘kiss my arse’, in Gaelic. Some people do not like to read instructions. In South Africa […]

Filed in Journalism, NEWS AT A GLANCE | Also tagged Adolf Hitler, Afrikaners, anatomy, death, demons, editors, employment, food, Gaelic, girlfriends, Hastings Banda, insects, Kilburn, kissing, lampposts, medicine, men, Nelson Evening Mail, painting, Peleliu, politics, Reading, rivers, Royal Navy, slavery, South Africa, suicide, the Bible, the Nile, the Pacific Ocean, the Torridge, USMC, Vincent Van Gogh, war, writing, youth | Comments (0)

Tag Archives: WW2

So Goode it’s bad

Kreises of conscience

My first Carr

Selassie come home

Hit and miss

Did The English Patient send me to Afghanistan?

Up diddly up, down diddly down

M.O.’s m.o. – or; Everybody wants to be like Mike

Monty’s trouble

NEWS AT A GLANCE

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