Shaping the 20th century.(War, Journalism and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century: The Life and Times of Henry W. Nevinson)(Book review)

Publication: English Literature in Transition 1880-1920

Publication Date: 01-JAN-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 ELT Press

Angela V. John. War, Journalism and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century: The Life and Times of Henry W. Nevinson. London: I. B. Tauris, 2006. xvii + 246 pp. $45.00

TO UNDERSTAND the significance for his time of the now almost forgotten writer brought before us by Angela John, one must imagine the decades at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries in which newspapers were the sole source of the latest news, in which the writers of newspaper leaders and "middles" were almost as well known, at least by educated readers, as television news anchors are today, in which reporters depended much less on government briefings than on firsthand investigations, and in which the style that a journalist commanded was of major importance. Imagine that time when war correspondents, hired by a particular newspaper for a specific mission, were often essentially freelance writers who more often than not walked or rode horseback wherever they chose to go amidst the battles. Imagine those years in which the censorship of war correspondents was less effective because the writers often said exactly what they wanted to say in widely read articles or books as soon as they returned from their assignments. Then also call to mind a period...

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