The ecstasy of war

I've been reading a lot of war memoirs for my PhD and J.Glenn Gray's "The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle" has struck me. Every page feels quotable. An American philosopher who heads to fight in Europe in 1941— his insights are into the experience of war are searing.  It's also beautifully written. The book...

Happiness in war

Can people be happy in war? When Tom Coupe was working in the Kyiv School of Economics in the Ukraine (KSE), he came across an interesting dataset which he sensed he could analyse. For years, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology had conducted a high quality “thoughts and opinions” survey of the Ukraine population. Researchers...

Bilal’s war

As the US and Taliban hold peace talks, a veteran reporter says the war in Afghanistan is degenerating with the frontline now “everywhere”. As a teenager, Bilal Sarwary was watching television when he saw footage of a plane flying into one of the World Trade Centre buildings in New York City. At the time, he...

The dreams of POWs

A few years back, Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher and associate professor at Harvard University, was teaching in London. She visited the Wellcome library, one of the world’s major resources for the study of medical history, and was searching ‘dreams’ in their index. She was startled to discover a file containing a collection of some...

The little-known history of Yuval Harari

The experience of war is a well-worn theme in films, novels, academic papers, memoirs, songs and poems. But the concept that fighting in a war is a life-changing experience is a relatively modern phenomena, according to internationally renowned historian Professor Yuval Noah Harari.Where medieval soldiers’ experience of war was akin to an indifferent “whatevs”, the...

The pleasures of war

“Anything is better than to have nothing at all happen day after day. You know that I do not love war or want it to return. But at least it made me feel alive, as I have not felt alive before or since.”   The above comment kick started my PhD project on “The Pleasures...