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Gardiner, Juliet

Juliet Gardiner has written extensively about the Home Front during the
Second World War and is now embarking on a series of meditations on the
period 1945–79.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [5] 15; [13] 33; [28] 38; [36] 81; [49] 80

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20050301125446 Juliet Gardiner on Patrick Wright, Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine

Tank Tracks

Juliet Gardiner on Patrick Wright, Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine

The tank is an emblem of state power, a behemoth that has transformed wars and threatened – and sometimes mown down – civilians. But it has also been seen as a ‘cubist slug’, has inspired a modernist song and dance routine Tanko, has led military men to philosophize, and installation artists to appropriate the rhomboid shape to suggest the ultimate in urban alienation. In short, the tank, as Tank so skilfully and wittily and sadly shows us, stands at the very heart of the twentieth century and points up its follies, its wickedness, its aspirations, its delusions – and occasionally its humanity.
20070301152428 Cover Art: Slightly Foxed Issue 13, Susan Leiper, ‘Spring Garden’ Susie Leiper is a freelance calligrapher in Edinburgh. Oriental, especially Chinese, art influences most of her work: the poetry on the cover is by the 20th-century Chinese poet Mu Dan, and the garden is inspired by Japanese paste-resist textiles. Susie is a Fellow of the Society of Scribes and Illuminators.

There for the Duration

Juliet Gardiner on Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote’s

‘It changed my life!’ people sometimes exclaim about a book. While I am fairly certain that has never happened to me, a book certainly changed my book. In the summer of 2004 I had finished writing a history of the home front in the Second World War. The manuscript was overdue and overlong, but at last it was in production and making a lot of work for everyone to ensure that it could be published in time for Christmas. Then one evening, sitting in the garden, I began to read At Mrs Lippincote’s by Elizabeth Taylor. And I knew I’d found what I didn’t know I was looking for,
20101201160830

Behind the Privet Hedge

Juliet Gardiner on R. C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September and Greengates

In 1936 my father designed the house in which I grew up in the Fifties. I would like to say that it was a textbook example of Thirties Modernism, like a small-scale model of an ocean liner in dry dock, with sinuous white curving walls punctuated by Crittall metal windows, and a flat roof – that signifier of all that was modern (or ‘moderne’ in house-speak). The inside white à la Syrie Maugham, with minimalist pale plywood furniture, maybe a Marion Dorn cubist-design rug on the herringbone parquet floor, smudgy John Piper textiles hung at the windows. A regular ‘machine for living’, form elegantly following function. Only it wasn’t.
20160601122241 James B.W. Lewis. Juliet Gardiner on Michael MacDonagh

London at War

Juliet Gardiner on Michael MacDonagh, In London during the Great War

Year by year literature of and about the First World War mounts –  books on its campaigns, causes, politics and economics; memoirs by politicians and generals; diaries and letters written by ordinary ‘Tommies’, by nurses in the front line and those involved on the Home Front, from the ‘Munitionettes’ who filled shells and assembled guns to the society ladies who rolled bandages and handed out tea and buns to departing soldiers. The catalogue of the London Library currently lists 1,475 titles on the First World War, and there will be many more to come during the remaining centenary years . . .
20121201121313 Juliet Gardener on Osbert Sitwell, Slightly Foxed Issue 36

A Glorious Contradiction

Juliet Gardiner on the works of Osbert Sitwell

Writing one’s autobiography involves a certain audacity: the presumption that one has a story to tell, that one can tell it engagingly, that there will be publishers willing to publish, readers eager to read and, in the dark reaches of the night, benign reviewers. But a life told in five volumes when the subject is but ‘nearing fifty and the grey hairs are beginning to show’, and is generally regarded as a second-rate author? Step forward Sir Osbert Sitwell, to enthusiastic applause.

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