Volume 56, Number 7 · April 30, 2009
On the Edge
By Adam Kirsch
The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900–1914
by Philipp Blom
Basic Books, 466 pp., $29.95
In his poem 'MCMXIV,' Philip Larkin looks back with pity and some astonishment at the England that greeted World War I, 'Grinning as if it were all/An August Bank Holiday lark.' Every trivial detail of the year 1914, described as if it came from an album of old photographs—the hats, the mustaches, the advertisements—strikes the poet, writing in 1960, as unbearably innocent:
Review, 3664 words
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