MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
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
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
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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