Word: tomlinsons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This is not only another eloquent book about the Battle of Britain. It is an even more eloquent book about the battle of H. M. Tomlinson, who sees that war is destroying the civilization of Britain even more effectively than the Nazis...
...Author Tomlinson (The Sea and the Jungle, Gallions Reach) is a writer with a very simple mind, almost tactile vision, and a somewhat self-conscious style that is widely considered good prose. A brilliant war correspondent in 1914-17, he grew to hate war so bitterly that he wrote Mars His Idiot, one of the anti-war books that helped disarm Britons psychologically between World Wars...
...twelve essays in The Wind is Rising, covering the twelve grimmest months in the bloody biennium from August 1939 to August 1941, chart the wavering course of Tomlinson's adjustment to the fact that this war is different. He writes: "I still think war an obscene outrage on the intelligence. I should not be in the least upset by what Communists call the downfall of British Imperialism. I see no reason to alter a line of what I wrote of war and peace in Mars His Idiot. . . . But this challenge by the Nazis is ultimate. . . . I know that some...
...days he reflected: "Embattled nations must get at each other in a pitchy midnight. . . . Even warfare is not what it was. Its glory is dirty. When a vast confusion is unintelligible in a prolonged and almost impenetrable darkness, it is difficult to add a touch of glory." Yet Author Tomlinson cannot escape the touch of glory at Dunkirk and the thought of Britain's air fighters: "I do not know how to write of those men who, few in number, went up on wings to avert Nazi dominion of Christendom...
...Author Tomlinson has much to say about the current bad health of democratic society and the changes which Britain is waiting for the end of the war to bring. He finds from conversations with the soldiers that many of them are of the same mind, and he lends a ready ear to their bitter indictment of "the blunders of their fathers" -as if every generation did not pay for the blunders of its fathers by perpetrating new blunders on its children. But the gentle Tomlinson mind is encased in a hard head. He cannot quite rid himself of a pessimism...