CHM

“Join the military, disappear into the wider whole; the pool of comradeship, discipline and military efficiency that is the physical representation of the nation at war.”
― Luke Turner, Men At War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945

“If we're to have a true picture of the masculinity of the war years, then as now, we cannot sweep the more unpleasant aspects of it out of sight in favour of idealised heroes. To deny men their raucous sexuality, however much it might have offended polite society then and a very different moral spectrum now, is to omit a huge part of themselves. Perhaps just like the boy who cannot resist picking up a twig to pretend it is a gun, they are a part of the uncomfortable truth of what it can be to be a man.”
― Luke Turner, Men At War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945

“Instead of a necessary processing, a readjustment, a redefinition as a post-imperial island that ought to have learned from the terrors of its past conflicts to forge closer relationships with Europe, the jingoistic memory of the war gives a boost to a national selfhood that is gaseous and unsustainable, forever on the edge of - and perhaps now finally - collapsing into hubris.”
― Luke Turner, Men At War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945

“The traditional elite view was that Roman marriage was a cold relationship arranged by adults for their children, its purpose and heart being procreation and the protection of family resources and influence, within this the wife 'lay back and thought of Rome', while the man exercised his sexual virility not just on her, but also on concubines, whores and slave girls”
― Robert Knapp, Invisible Romans