It’s as much part of Christmas as holly and carols – the annual newspaper story where parents are furious because some well-meaning vicar, either in a sermon or in a talk at school, has let slip that Father Christmas doesn’t exist, and gets to understand just how angry self-righteous and sentimental parents can get. When…
Read More“Some of us,” intones Sir Max Hastings, with all the authority of a man who has written enough bestselling military histories to fill a small packing case – “Some of us reject any glib response to complex social and psychological issues.” Well, yes, and that’s part of the problem. The “complex social and psychological issues”…
Read MoreDear Vernon, I’m not sure you’ll welcome a letter from me: after all, I’m the guy who wrote Walking Wounded, the Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell – the guy who has been trampling all over your memories for the last four years, picking over your private diaries like someone peeping in your bathroom window,…
Read MoreMy book, Walking Wounded, the Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell, describes how Scannell came home from the war a broken man. The doctors could treat the bullets in his legs, but they couldn’t see the damage that had been done to his soul. Crouching in a hole in the ground as the shells scream…
Read MoreExtract from Chapter 16, Walking Wounded – the Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell Scannell wrote on the big themes – “Death, courage, art, sex. C’est tout!” he once suggested sardonically – but he found them, above all, in everyday life and the experiences of disregarded, forgotten people … … He had a sharp eye…
Read MoreExtract from Chapter 15, Walking Wounded – the Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell And now, surely, the story should be over, and the last book written. But at the end of June 2007, John Lucas, whose Shoestring Press had published Behind the Lines three years earlier, received in the post what Scannell admitted was…
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