The Christmas Truce is no stranger to popular entertainment – this year more than any other as its 100th anniversary is marked. The famous moment when British and German soldiers climbed out of the trenches…
The audio drama evangelist and bloodhound in me has caught scent of the fragrant odour of a renaissance. The immense popularity of Serial, with its style of journalistic storytelling and dramatic sensation…
Most people probably have an image of World War I derived as much from popular culture as from school textbooks, especially in this centenary year. It is the image of hopelessly naïve soldier-victims marching…
During World War I, severe post-traumatic reactions reached an epidemic scale that surpassed anything known from previous armed conflicts. The centenary of the Great War has reminded us of the tremendous…
The German-Jewish painter and writer Paul Cohen-Portheim had spent a peaceful summer in 1914 visiting friends in Devon and enjoying the beautiful south-west coast. But his idyllic holiday came to an abrupt…
On Remembrance Sunday, while in my native Germany a wall of white balloons dissolved into the air to mark the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, I joined thousands at the Tower of London…
Tom Gregory, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
Every year on Remembrance Day, we pause to look back on old wars and recount the tallies of the dead, including 16 million killed in the first world war and 60 million in the second world war. And every…
US philosopher William H.F. Altman will deliver the keynote address at Crisis and Reconfigurations: 100 years of European Thought Since 1914, a conference hosted by the European Philosophy and the History…
When I received the tsunami of promotional gumph on BBC Radio 4’s cultural and technological blitzkrieg on the Great War, I have to confess I groaned. Tommies is one element of this package, a dramatisation…
The idea of a war hero is still strong in the UK and in the other Allied countries. War memorials are a central feature of the regular commemoration services, Churchill is regularly rolled out in biographical…
The government is unveiling commemorative paving stones laid in the birth places of those members of the British Empire forces in World War I who received the Victoria Cross for their bravery. The government’s…
Since the end of the Cold War, politicians have had recourse to air power on a number of occasions. The conflicts have varied in scale, duration and intensity. Air power played a huge role in the two Gulf…
One of the most famous anthems of the First World War is 100 years old. Keep the Home Fires Burning was originally published on October 8 1914 under its original title, Till the Boys Come Home. Few songs…
Taken immediately after the ceasefire that ended the first Gulf War in 1991, Kenneth Jarecke’s photograph of the charred corpse of an Iraqi soldier in his burned-out jeep is one of the few memorable images…
What the conflict would mean for British art was much debated in World War I – the question was already being asked in journals and newspaper reviews in the latter part of 1914. At the beginning debate…
An “initial gifting package”: the opaque label is wrapped around £1.6m worth of heavy machine guns and half a million rounds of ammunition, which has now reached the Iraqi town of Arbil courtesy of the…
Is the conflict in Ukraine a war? This question has been raised in recent reports about a Russian invasion in Ukraine on the Caspian Sea. The USA and other NATO powers call it an “incursion”; the Baltic…
On the first day of the war in 1914, British newspapers published appeals for young men to join the colours, and to fight against Germany. Following the advice of the new Secretary for War, Lord Kitchener…
The volunteer is at the heart of British perceptions of the World War I. We are all familiar with images of young men leaving home, standing in long queues at recruiting stations, and being examined by…
The Louvain library in Belgium and its priceless collection of medieval manuscripts were destroyed by German soldiers exactly 100 years ago today – and so it is timely to ponder the links between education…