Ian Ousby (1947–2001)

Several things about this book annoy me, but one thing makes me a bit irate. A reference book isn't worth a good deal unless the editors stive to make it objective and accurate and this one isn't consistently either. (Mine is the Head edition, so perhaps I'm being unfair to the others.) I've skipped about reading entries and have thus read that George Gissing had only one friend and that his marriages failed because Gissing felt that his wives weren't sufficiently grateful to him. I've also read that Isabel Burton burned her husband's writings because he drank a lot and travelled a lot.

These don't seem to me simply sloppy inaccuracies. They're so supremely removed from the factual as to seem, particularly in the Gissing entry, the product of malevolence. Why? Because they're dead white men--or, worse, dead white Victorian men? Because the writer(s) didn't approve of their books? And if I lit upon these porkies by chance, how many more are there in the volume? I'm keeping the book because it has entries on the more modern British writers, but I'm taking it all with a packload of salt--and I'm pitying any student who might be relying on it.

For an infinitely superior reference, get The Reader's Encyclopedia, ed. Benet. Not only does it seem objective and accurate but it has the enormous bonus of covering mythological and religious works, literary terms, and the like.

(After writing that much, I kept the Guide for a year. I rarely used it, never browsed it, and found it wasn't even much of a help with the TLS crosswords Before packing it away with books to be traded in, I riffled through it to see whether my perception that there was a strange disproportion in it had any basis. Leaving aside personal taste and considering only reputation/skill/influence I was disheartened to find that the entry for P.G. Wodehouse was longer than that for William Gass and that Agatha Christie's entry was longer than Elizabeth Taylor's. And within these pairs, each writer was given very nearly equal column inches: Mary Shelley and Edgar Allen Poe; J.K. Rowling and William Burroughs; James Thomson (B.V.) and George Orwell; and, sigh, Mrs Humphrey Ward and Oscar Wilde.)… (plus d'informations)

How was a battle like Verdun possible? The question has been answered often in its political, military, and technological aspects, but here [a:Ian Ousby|174858|Ian Ousby|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/m_50x66-82093808bca726cb3249a493fbd3bd0f.png] sets out to find its social origins.

At first this might sound odd, but consider that about 70% of the French army was rotated through the meat grinder of Verdun during the battle of February to December 1916 with at least 150,000 dying there and leaving the front line little changed. Why did men put themselves through this?

We know that politics and the alliance with Russia brought France into the war. We know that the military movements of August and September 1914 gave the front line its shape and gave the allies the poisoned chalice of the initiative. We also know that developments in military technology in preceding decades had given the advantage on the battlefield to the defence.

But what drove men forward into hails of machine gun fire time and time again? Why did men living with the permanent possibility of vapourisation by artillery shell not break in greater numbers than they did? These questions are less explored and Ousby goes searching for the answers in an examination of French social life from the Franco-Prussian War to 1916.

Ousby's book, his last before his early death, is a bold and fascinating thrust into new ground on the historiography of the battle and the war itself.… (plus d'informations)