Luke’s Reviews > Testament of Youth > Status Update

...She says that she has never yet written a book without making an enemy...

"Why is it that all my university mentors want me to do research-work at the expense of fiction, and my literary mentors fiction at the expense of history?"

England, panic-stricken, was frantically raising the military age to fifty...

...as though we could somehow compensate the dead by remembering them regardless of expense.

How differently did the Golden Virgin of the Basilica in Albert, with its precariously steepled position and auguried status, feel in Boyden's Three Day Road. I wonder if Brittain ever considered the part Canada played in WWI, or had the faintest clue of how war is fought by the indigenous populations of colonizing countries. True, she had her grief, but not grief's sole ownership.

The temptation to exploit our young wartime enthusiasm must have been immense—and was not fiercely resisted by the military authorities.

I myself cannot yet realise that each little singing thing that flies near me holds latent in it the power of death for someone.

...I joined the Pass Mods. class and studied the Cyropædia and Livy's Wars with a resentful feeling that there was quite enough war in the world without having to read about it in Latin.

Lest anyone should suspect the family of being literary, these volumes were concealed beneath a heavy curtain in the chill, gloomy dining-room.