The Red Sweet Wine of Youth: the British First World War Poets Launched in London

Tomorrow night in London at King's College in The Strand I will be in conversation with Max Saunders, biographer of Ford Madox Ford, talking about my new book about the British poets of the First World War: The Red Sweet Wine of Youth (Little, Brown).  This event takes place in The Anatomy Museum so bring your intellectual scalpels along at 6.30pm.  It's free and there are refreshments.  The book, just published, has already been reviewed favourably in The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal though I have to say, for the world of global finance, it doesn't have any special message that I can work out!  See also this and this from Dermot Bolger.  I am also very pleased to have been recommended by the War Poets blog of Tim Kendall, a leading British expert on war poetry and Professor of English at Exeter University.

Oscar Wilde Week Begins!

Over at the always excellent Baroque in Hackney blog news of the start of Oscar Wilde Week in conjunction with Esoteric London blog.  Go to!

We approve very much of Wilde here at BB so more power to their joint elbows.

Another piece of scintillating news.  After rejecting Twitter and flouncing out of its room 18 months ago, claiming that it was a waste of time, I have now slyly crept back in as @bloomsburyman.  I am going to give it another go but equally determined not to let it take over my trivia-time.

Get Real!

Today's Times Literary Supplement has an item about my new satirical broadside Get Real! (Rack Press) aimed at those nice people in the coalition Government.  In the diary column the notoriously stringent critic, "J.C." is very complimentary.  Details of how to order this can be found at the Rack Press website.  If you live in London you can buy it over the counter at the London Review Bookshop in Bury Place or Bookmarks in Bloomsbury Street.

The Red Sweet Wine of Youth: the British First World War Poets

Today is publication day of my new book on the British poets of the First World War, The Red Sweet Wine of Youth and I am writing this on a train to Liverpool where Radio Merseyside is to have the privilege of being the first to talk to me about it.  This is my fourteenth (or twelfth, depending on how you categorise a couple of publications that are hardly book-length) since my first book was published in 1993 and maybe it's time to pause for breath...well, until after the weekend at any rate.

Like most of my fellow-writers of more-or-less-serious books the struggle to survive gets harder. Reading The Author, the journal of the Society of Authors, is a sort of mediaeval penance, a glum self-scourging, and most writers I know are ducking and diving, teaching and preaching, hustling for some tossed coin of fugitive income.  Delightful reviews, the positive responses of one's friends, even the fleeting sight of one of one's books in a branch of Waterstone's, never seem to make any inroads into penury.

But it's fun to write, or we wouldn't be doing it, and the spectacle of writers bleating is never an edifying one.

News that a reprint of TRSWOY (as the emails now have it) of 2000 hardback copies, was ordered even before publication day is heartening.  I hope you enjoy it.

Update: a review from the Financial Times of 12 February 2011