‘Blasted Things’ with Lesley Glaister

How do you write a novel about the First World War without resorting to cliché?

This month, Angus, Chris and Jessica speak to novelist Lesley Glaister about her new book, Blasted Things, set in the aftermath of the war. Along the way we discuss family history, what it feels like to hold historical documents, the medico-legal definition of PTSD and how to capture the register of a place and time effectively.

References

Lesley Glaister, Blasted Things
Lesley Glaister, Little Egypt
Lesley Glaister, Easy Peasy

Anne Powell, Women in the War Zone

Rebecca West, Return of the Soldier

Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End

Aldous Huxley

Rosamund Lehman

Virginia Woolf

May Sinclair

Agatha Christie, Witness for the Prosecution, adapted by Sarah Phelps

Louisa Young, My Dear, I Have Something to Tell You

Sarah Waters

Dorothy Whipple, High Wages

Wendy Gagen, (2007) ‘Remastering the Body, Renegotiating Gender: Physical Disability and Masculinity during the First World War, the Case of J. B. Middlebrook’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 14:4, 525-541,DOI: 10.1080/13507480701752169

Oliver Wilkinson, British Prisoners of War in First World War Germany, Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Joel Morley, ‘Dad ‘never said much’ but… Young Men and Great War Veterans in Day-to-Day-Life in Interwar Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, Volume 29, Issue 2, June 2018, Pages 199–224, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwx063

Michael Roper, ‘Re-remembering the Soldier Hero: the Psychic and Social Construction of Memory in Personal Narratives of the Great War’, History Workshop Journal, Volume 50, Issue 1, AUTUMN 2000, Pages 181–204, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/2000.50.181

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Professor of Modern British History at Leeds University. My research interests lie at the intersection of the histories of gender, particularly masculinity, medicine and warfare.

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A historian focusing on the First World War and popular representations of warfare. I received my PhD from the University of Sussex in 2013. My thesis examined relations between British and French soldiers during the First World War.

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Is a Visiting Research Fellow at Leeds University. My current research focuses on manpower and authority in Britain, starting with the First World War and running through until the end of the Second World War.