War Like a Wasp: The Lost Decade of the Forties - Softcover

Sinclair, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571251218 ISBN 13: 9780571251216

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2011

Synopsis

I would rather have been in London under siege between 1940 and 1945 than anywhere else,' John Lehmann said, 'except perhaps Troy in the time that Homer celebrated.' Paradoxically perhaps the 1940s was a decade of cultural efflorescence. Writing, painting, theatre, cinema and dancing all thrived: Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, T. S. Eliot, George Orwell and Laurence Olivier all produced some of their best work in this period. In this sweeping and important book, Andrew Sinclair recreates the world of the 1940s with its encounters and characters, its conflicts and its discoveries, its hopes and its disillusions. It was a world of pubs and clubs, where scarce drink could be found and the war forgot. It was the time of the short piece, the poem, the story and the sketch. Anyone who knew anyone in the loose coterie of Fitzrovia could have anything published. Everything printed was read by a nation avid for learning and waiting for action. War Like a Wasp recreates a feverish and democratic time using the words of the period. In his original and witty account of the decade, Andrew Sinclair has made sure nobody will ever think of the 1940s in the same way again. 'Soho and the disease writers caught there, Sohoitis, are the main enthusiasm of War Like a Wasp. They make Sinclair's book a keen Remembrance of Times Pissed - Dylan Thomas brawling, brawling, getting the DTs, Dan Davin slugging or about to be slugged, the unsubsidised editor Tambimuttu (known to some as Tuttifrutti) cadging drinks and poems, louche painters clustered about Nina Hamnett's dying Parisian flame, huge Anna Wickham biting people in the head, all the rough traders, brief encounters and lost girls.' Valentine Cunningham, the Observer 'He has a talent for creating memorable phrases. He calls Dylan Thomas 'the poet with lips like Michelin tyres'. He describes the aftermath of a bombing raid in prose that is uncommonly vivid. He makes you see and smell the terrible damage.' Michael Sheldon, Washington Post

About this title

About the Author

Andrew Sinclair (born 1935) is a novelist, historian, critic and film-maker. He was a founding member of Churchill College, Cambridge. From his rich, varied and extensive bibliography Faber Finds is reissuing his first two novels, The Breaking of Bumbo and My Friend Judas, both published in 1959, his history of Prohibition in America, Prohibition: The Era of Excess and his cultural history of Britain in the 1940s, War Like a Wasp: The Lost Decade of the Forties.

From Library Journal

Individuals wanting to immerse themselves in Fitzrovia and the British arts scene of the Forties can pick up this book. Relying heavily on quotation to create an air of authenticity, it moves quickly from theme to theme, and the result is a better understanding of a largely ignored decade, its cross-fertilization among the arts, its ethos (alienation), and its forms (short pieces and sketchwork prevailing). The atmosphere here is the message. However, the book does little to attract the general reader and demands a lot of patience. Names are thrown around with dizzying speed (page 120, selected at random, names 11 different individuals); they are sometimes made something of, and sometimes not. The well-knowns and the who-knows are jumbled together as they probably were in the pubs. Meanwhile, there may not be enough sustained argument to attract subject specialists. In sum, very interesting, but not essential.
-Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0571251218
• ISBN 13: 9780571251216
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 354