MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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Book review: The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris
Plastic surgery was pioneered on those injured in World War I. JAN WOOLF reads an account of how this technology emerged, written with grace and love
Developments in technology in WWI meant unprecedented
bloodshed and injury. A British Red Cross horse cart medical aid wagon is pictured here in Egypt 1915
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ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
The Facemaker, by Lindsey Fitzharris
Allen Lane, £20
OFTEN after war, comes technical advance for peacetime: but afterwards, not before, as all funded effort is in the technology of killing.
World War II brought us radar and emotional attachment theory. World War I — that rich man’s war in which 15 million poor men died — plastic surgery, for when returning with a lost limb could make you a hero, a lost face made you a monster.
“The science of healing stood baffled before the science of destroying.” But one surgeon met the challenge, Harold Gilles, known as the grandfather of plastic surgery for his pioneering work in reconstructing the faces of soldiers that had had them torn away by the killing machinery.
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