David Reynolds > Quotes

“So, in the still-lingering shadow of 1861–65, let us suspend disbelief for a while and look more attentively at Europe’s Great War. To a large extent, American perceptions of 1914–18 have been influenced by debates in Britain—readily accessible via the “common language.” There 1914–18 has become a literary war, a human tragedy detached from its moorings in historical events, entrenched in the mud of Flanders and Picardy, illuminated only by a few antiwar poets such as Wilfred Owen—perhaps the most studied writer in the English school curriculum after William Shakespeare. “My subject is War and the pity of War,” Owen declared. “The Poetry is in the pity.” Yet by reducing the conflict to personal tragedies, however moving, the British have lost the big picture: history has been distilled into poetry.6”
― David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century

“Initially Tories regarded the 1918 franchise with deep apprehension – none more so than Stanley Baldwin, the shrewd, bluff Worcestershire businessman who was party leader for fourteen years from 1923 to 1937 and prime minister on three occasions (1923–4, 1924–9 and 1935–7). Although the family's iron and steel business made Baldwin a very wealthy man, his approach to both business and politics was paternalistic and inclusive – in short, a ‘One Nation’ Tory. And from his mother's more cultured family (the painter Edward Burne-Jones was an uncle and Rudyard Kipling one of his cousins) Baldwin derived a keen, often romanticized sense of England's heritage”
― David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century