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BOOK REVIEWS the Basta quarter of the city, was the scene of heavy fighting in the late 1980, and the headstone has probably been destroyed." Elsewhere he is even closer to Knightley. When the reader comes across an observation that he does not immediately know for a fact, his first impulse is to wonder whether Halperin has misquoted or misremembered Knightley or another source. Again an example: Halperin claims that Philby's very considerable ability as a linguist enabled him in India to earn about £20,000 as a tutor. Well, maybe. Or is Halperin remembering incorrectly Knightley's "The ICS [Indian Civil Service] encouraged its officers to become proficient at Indian languages by rewarding those who passed the examinations with one-time cash payments as well as salary bonuses . The cash payments were not inconsiderable and between 1911 and 1915 St John Philby earned in this manner Re 10,000 (in today's values, more than £20,000 or $36,000)"? What is unsettling is that one feels one would have to check. And although the book has a "Works Consulted," Halperin does not use footnotes. Eminent Georgians is a pleasantly opinionated book, but not perfectly reliable. St. Martin's Press has not done its author proud: margins are too narrow, and the photographs are badly reproduced. M. D. Allen University of Wisconsin Center—Fox Valley Literature of the Great War Bernard Bergonzi. Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War. 1965; Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1996. 3rd ed. 248 pp. Paper £12.95 BERNARD BERGONZI has been a shrewd observer and maker of English literary history for more than three decades. Carcanet has now issued a revised edition of one of his best books, thirty-one years after its first publication by Constable. This third version—there had been a second, published by Macmillan in 1980—contains some fairly extensive revisions and additions, including a new final chapter. The revisions are interesting, and tell us quite a lot about how the field has developed in three decades. But the unrevised parts are, in a way, more impressive, as evidence of how much Bergonzi got right the first time in what was, in 1965, an area of study which was just beginning to be invented. Bergonzi himself suggests that the writings of the Great War emerged as a coherent literary and academic subject in 1960, the year of D. S. R. Welland's Wilfred Owen: A Critical Study. Another landmark was John H. Johnston's English Poetry of the First World War, which came out a 83 ELT 40 : 1 1997 year before Bergonzi's book. But it was really Heroes'Twilight itself that offered the first comprehensive map of the whole area in British writing, its prose as well as its poetry, from the spectacular heights of Rosenberg and Owen to the long meanderings of Henry Williamson's roman fleuve and the numinous wood of David Jones's In Parenthesis. What Bergonzi did in 1965 was to establish a canon for what soon became one of the most popular of all areas of literary study. The canon has changed somewhat—though perhaps not greatly—over thirty years, and this new edition reflects some ofthat change. There had been other wars and other war literatures before, and there have been more since. But nothing has yet shaken the unique fascination of this war, and this literature, and the conviction that both shows us—at what price—a distinguished and terrible truth. If Bergonzi is one of the inventors of "the literature of the Great War," it is worth reminding ourselves of the context of that invention. Many of the writers whose work is discussed in Heroes'Twilight were still alive and, in most cases, still writing in 1965—including Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, Herbert Read, Osbert Sitwell, Henry Williamson, and David Jones. (So was Vera Brittain, whose Testament of Youth was unnoticed by Bergonzi in 1965 but who is included in the revised version.) Bergonzi doesn't seem to have been particularly inhibited by the idea of these veterans—each in their way still haunted, fifty years on—reading over his shoulder, but it may...

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