War and Peace

"Classics of literature often seem intimidating, especially when they’re long. What’s interesting about them is that often they’re very easy reads, especially once you adjust to the language, which normally takes a few chapters. For me, War and Peace was, literally, a beach read. I read it on holiday the year I turned 19. I spent the days on the beach clutching it in the sand. At night, I stayed awake in the hut where we were staying to find out what happened next by the light of a small lamp, long after everyone else had gone to sleep and trying my best not to disturb anyone. War and Peace is work of historical fiction that Tolstoy began in 1863—when he was 35 and recently married with a newborn baby—and it looked back to the Napoleonic invasion of Russia half a century before. As editor of Five Books, I’ve spent a lot of energy adding information to our War and Peace page , looking at how it was initially reviewed, what Tolstoy himself said about it, which translation is best and giving my personal take on it. So many experts we’ve interviewed have recommended it and it is an immensely significant book. But, at the end of the day, the reason to read it is that it’s just such pleasurable escapism into a world that’s gone forever. A brutal world, perhaps, when examined by the cold light of day, but still an immensely glamorous and romantic one. One additional thought on War and Peace and long reads: the book is such an institution, that often when describing another book they love people will say, “This is the War and Peace of…” For example, military historian Antony Beevor called Life and Fate by the Soviet journalist Vasily Grossman “the War and Peace of the 20th century.” It also works across cultures, so The Tale of Genji (which is by a woman, thank goodness) is described as the War and Peace of Japan or The Story of the Stone is the War and Peace of China. If you’re War and Peace obsessed, it’s a nice way of expanding your reading in new directions. —Sophie Roell, Editor"

"War and Peace was first drafted in the late 1850s and early 1860s. It was going to be a novel about the Decembrists, who had tried to raise an army against the autocracy in 1825. Tolstoy took inspiration from the liberal spirit of 1856, when Alexander II came to the throne and began introducing reforms. The Decembrists, who had been exiled after the uprising of 1825, began to come back and Tolstoy was particularly interested in the history of his own family. He was a distant relative of one of the most famous Decembrists, Sergey Volkonsky, whom he met in Moscow after his return. They wanted to impose a constitution on the monarchy, and they wanted to liberate the serfs. That was very much Tolstoy’s instinct too, politically. So he found inspiration in the Decembrists but wanting to write a novel about them, he realized that their worldview was formed in 1812, when they had been young officers. They had rubbed shoulders with ordinary serf soldiers, seen their democratic spirit and gone a bit democratic themselves. They started smoking Russian makhorka , rough tobacco, out of pipes rather than the cigarettes they might have smoked otherwise. They wore their hair long and grew beards and identified with the democratic spirit of the peasants. In many ways, that was the beginning of the 19th-century Russian intelligentsia’s romance of the peasant, as humble and somehow morally higher than the nobility. As the sons of the serf owners, the landowners (as Tolstoy himself was) felt they owed a debt to these people. With the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, they felt they should dedicate themselves to the true emancipation of the serfs, by helping them to become literate. Tolstoy set up schools for his serfs. They didn’t quite understand what he was doing and were a bit mistrustful of his generosity, but he wanted to bring them up to the level of the intelligentsia through education, welfare reforms and all the rest of it. He wanted to make a nation with the serfs. “These novels…challenge us to think about the big questions of life” Tolstoy grew up in a family where Russian was the language of the serfs and the nannies who were employed to look after the children, but the parents, the aristocracy, spoke almost exclusively in French. Of course, they could speak and write in Russian, but French was the preferred language of society. So you get this duality. The world of society, where everything is comme il faut, seemed artificial and distant to people like Tolstoy. They wanted to put into literature the language of ordinary Russians. That was the romantic nationalism in Russian literature from the age of Pushkin. War and Peace is about that period of 1812 as a watershed in Russia’s cultural history when the intelligentsia and the aristocracy discovered the Russian people, their own Russianness. There’s the famous scene in War and Peace with Natasha’s dance, which I took for the beginning of my book on Russia’s cultural history . There’s some sort of sensibility of Russianness that the aristocracy shared with the peasants that they wanted to explore, and that exploration is part of Tolstoy’s novel. It’s very interesting what happens with the novel linguistically. There’s been a study of the French words in the novel, because there are a large number, and they feature particularly in the early phases of the novel. Towards the end, the novel becomes more Russian in its literary and vernacular style, in its lexicon and syntax. In a sense, the Russian language is the true character of the novel. The growing Russianness of the language is the epiphany, that moment of self-discovery, that the Russian aristocracy goes through at that time. That gives you a sense of the sprawling nature of the novel. You can read it for its war scenes, you can read it for its love scenes, but then there’s this whole infrastructure of the novel which is about Russia’s identity, who these people should be. So it’s endlessly fascinating as a novel and despite its length, it’s a novel that like many people I’ve returned to several times. I’ve read it four times, I think, but each time you read it, other things about it come out. The early drafts are various stories about a landowner trying to liberate his serfs and he’s a Decembrist or in that circle. But then Tolstoy decides that to understand the moment of the Decembrists, he has to start in 1812 because that’s when they discovered their worldview. It’s only then that he begins to do his research on the Napoleonic Wars and read diaries written at the time by people like Glinka and recasts the novel. The early drafts of the novel weren’t massively long or anything, they were just sketches of what would become a novel about the Decemberists, which then became the novel War and Peace . For nostalgic reasons, I am attached to the Maudes’ translation. I’ve still got the volume from my 14th birthday. It’s very easy to read, almost like reading George Eliot . It’s a very smooth read in the style of the 19th-century English novel. The more recent Pevear and Volokhonsky translation , which I reviewed in the New York Review of Books , focused on some of the linguistic issues. It is the way translations have gone in the last 20 years, towards a more authentic translation, a closer reflection of the inconsistencies of the original. Tolstoy is a very repetitive writer; he doesn’t mind repeating words several times in a sentence. That gets lost in the Maudes’ translation but it’s there in all its messiness in Pevear and Volokhonsky. It doesn’t make for the most pleasurable read, but you feel you’re getting more out of the book than you would if you read something that was a little bit smoother. So I think both have their virtues."

"I chose it, first of all, not exclusively in relation to war. It happens to be one of my three favourite novels, so I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to talk about it. I am also interested in it in relation to war for a number of reasons, some of which have to do with the fact that I’m French. First of all, Tolstoy is read by the French very widely, perhaps more widely than by the British, as far as I can make out. Tolstoy, of course, knew French very well: strictly speaking French was his mother tongue. Interestingly, the first paragraph of the novel is in French. I was reading the other day that two per cent of the novel is actually written in French. The Russian aristocracy spoke in French, and, in fact, Tolstoy learnt Russian only because his nanny spoke to him in Russian: his parents spoke to him in French. What’s very interesting about the novel is that, at the beginning, there is quite a lot of French, but, as the novel progresses, as the French become clearly and increasingly identified with the enemy, and as the novel re-centres itself, as it were, around the particular ideal of Russianness, then there is less French, and the aristocrats more and more, even between themselves, speak Russian. So in 1812, 1813, 1815 they speak Russian, unless they don’t want to be understood by their children. But at the beginning of the novel, in 1805, all that they speak is French. Tolstoy’s choice of the language in which his characters speak is indicative of the ways in which the Napoleonic wars, he argues, have changed Russian society, or rather the Russian aristocracy, because he doesn’t write very well about non-aristocrats. Above and behind the language, Tolstoy, in the novel, looks at the way in which the Napoleonic wars have influenced and shaped the life and destiny of five aristocratic families. As the novel starts, those aristocratic families display a particular kind of culture, a particular kind of sensibility that many people, rightly or wrongly, associate with French culture. When I first read the book a long, long time ago, I was very sensitive to that. As a French person, it’s particularly interesting to read about the impact of the Napoleonic wars on a society other than French society. I also studied Russian at school, and War and Peace is, in fact, the first Russian novel I ever read, at first in translation, and then in Russian. It spoke to me, and it still speaks to me in that way. Through my knowledge of the language I can hear the rhythm of the sentences, and so on. Of course, when I started thinking and writing about war as a scholar, I became more aware of other features of the book in relation to war which I wasn’t really aware of before. To give you a few examples, we tend to talk quite a lot about the ‘fog of war,’ the fog that makes it impossible for soldiers really to make the kind of decisions that they ought to make, either strategically or ethically. There are a number of relevant scenes in the novel, and one in particular, which takes place in 1805, in the Battle of Austerlitz. One of the main characters of the book, Nikolai Rostov, is lost on the battlefield in the fog of war. Tolstoy shows, with extraordinary power and clarity, precisely how unclear things are. Rostov doesn’t know where he is, he doesn’t know whether the shadows he sees moving are Russian soldiers, or French soldiers about to kill him. It’s one of the most vivid literary passages I’ve ever read about war. It describes the sort of conditions under which soldiers, more often than not, have to operate, when they simply do not know what it is that they’re doing. So that’s one literary example, an illustration of the view that philosophers try to articulate: given that a soldier has to operate under those sorts of conditions, what moral expectations can we reasonably form of that particular soldier? “War is the product of millions of individual decisions which collide with each other” The book also talks about the losses of war, the loss of life. One of the main male characters, Andrei Bolkonsky, dies in war in 1812. In the latter parts of the novel, we see the impact that his death has on his loved ones. There are other characters who die, less prominent characters, and again, Tolstoy shows very well the impact that their deaths have on those who survive. Survivor guilt is at play there, as well as the grief of a mother who has lost one of her two sons ­– not just the grief actually, but the grief-induced depression that can take hold of someone when they have lost a child. Again, we know that, but Tolstoy describes it with profound compassion, humanity and tenderness even, for his characters and for his fellow human beings who have gone through this in real life. The final point I want to make about the novel is that it is followed by an appendix which Tolstoy wrote when the novel was finally finished and published in extenso in 1869. One of the key questions that Tolstoy asks in the appendix is the central question of War and Peace : how can we explain the fact that, on orders, millions of people go out and kill one another, when they know that killing another human being is morally wrong? His answer to this question is that we should dispense with the view that they so act because of the genius of one person: Napoleon, for example, or because of the shrewd military brain of a general, such as the Russian General Kutozov. We can’t explain the phenomenon, Tolstoy says, other than by realising that war is the product of millions of individual decisions which collide with each other, which are the product of pure chance and luck. What Tolstoy concludes is that we are deluding ourselves if we think that soldiers act freely when they decide to go: they don’t. That’s one point where, according to Tolstoy, we don’t have free will: the point at which we have to make a decision whether or not to go to fight. He says it’s inevitable that we shall all follow our regiments: we do not have freedom of will in those cases. That’s a question that philosophers of war have all asked themselves relentlessly: are soldiers really free to act, or not to act, in such ways?"

"There is a big dispute between historians and novelists because, essentially, when a historian picks up an artefact or a document and says, ‘Here’s the Magna Carta,’ the next thing they do is construct a narrative around it. By virtue of their training and their special skills, we’re then supposed to accept this narrative as truth. You see this in programmes where they pick up this little spear tip and say, ‘The people here hunted and they ate this and did this’—and you’re like, ‘Dude, that’s a spear tip.’ Then you’ve got novelists coming in, sometimes using the same source material, and doing the exact same thing—but historians will reject it outright and say, ‘No—that is not historical fact: these are fantasies.’ This is understandable, because if you’re in a university and you’re a professor of history, I think in this climate it’s better for your field to be aligned to the sciences than to humanities. But I digress. “He’s forcing us to rethink some of the meaning or interpretations that we’ve previously given to these great historical events. And that’s very important.” Tolstoy tries to guide us away from the ‘Great Man’ notion of history—we think of Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan etc. And here we have Napoleon. The contemporary historical accounts say that, ‘Napoleon did this and he conquered that and he went there with his troops.’ But Tolstoy does something which is very unusual in War and Peace and which, for his time, was pretty profound: he sees the conditions of the ordinary soldier on the battlefield. I mentioned earlier about how it’s difficult to impose meaning on our own contemporary time because stuff is still happening. He’s trying to stimulate our thinking about that. There is a line in the book where he says a battle might turn because one brave guy shouts out ‘hurrah’ (or something like that). But our historical interpretation, the way we would look at it, is that the battle was won because Napoleon planned A, B, C, D etc. and he was a great general. In a way, he shows us just how chaotic these events are. Once the battle starts, it’s so chaotic that the plan for the battle just goes out the window straightaway. “Recently, China has added an extra six years to their war with Japan, for patriotic reasons. History is not something that is fixed. It is something that is very malleable and can be rewritten.” So, he’s forcing us to rethink some of the meaning or interpretations that we’ve previously given to these great historical events. And that’s very important. It leads us to some of the work that more contemporary historical novelists have done. For example Laila Lalami, who wrote The Moor’s Account about the opening up of America. She wrote it from a slave’s perspective. There are Spanish accounts of the first conquistadores, the guys who made it back to Spain, one of whom was a slave. Everyone else in that party got asked to give an account of what happened, except the slave. So, Lalami, by taking those accounts, tries to piece out what the slave’s perspective of events might have been—which gives you a very different view of that historical period from what you would otherwise have in contemporary narratives. So, in a way, Tolstoy really opened up a space where now contemporary writers can write back and do interesting things with the form. Yes. That brings us to one of the problems with the practice of history-making. There is one school of thought that sees history as a process of forgetting rather than remembering—you discard huge chunks of stuff. When you think about the source materials—when they use letters, say. You have to assume, firstly, that the writer knew exactly what they were talking about, that they weren’t biased etc. You take the letter-writers material and you say that it’s accurate, but we give it a validity that far outweighs [what we should], because, when we look at most interactions during a war, they don’t happen by letter. It’s face-to-face. That might be changing in this particular historical period but a lot of stuff isn’t recorded. “We can impose meaning on the past in ways that we can’t really do with the present or, certainly, the future, which hasn’t happened.” So, you take little chunks of recorded material and, again, you think of who has access to the materials and the education that you need to record stuff. It’s a certain class of people that you note down and say, ‘Ok this is what happened at that particular time.’ No one is really writing about the peasants because the peasants didn’t leave anything behind that the historical novelist or the historian might look at and say, ‘This is what they did or this is what they felt individually.’ I think it also sums up one of the fears about this period that we’re living in now which is the idea that we’re generating so much paperwork and so much communication that it might actually become impossible for future historians to construct histories because there is just so much material out there. What do you pin down and say, ‘Okay this is what defines the year 2016?’ I think that’s very important. That certainly has been one of the defences that historical novelists have made, ‘Look! We actually generate interest in history.’ People know they’re reading fiction but they can go on to read other things and certainly be in a position of questioning historical accounts that we take for granted. Think of the last education minister in England, who wanted to change the history curriculum to make it more patriotic. Recently, China has added an extra six years to their war with Japan, for patriotic reasons. History is not something that is fixed. It is something that is very malleable and can be rewritten. But you would certainly hope that the reader of fiction—particularly when they come across these alternate accounts—can at least, when they engage with more authoritative history texts, meet them with a more sceptical eye."

"War and Peace . Tolstoy also has a view of history that he sets out very clearly in the second epilogue. He writes the novel, he describes what happens in 1812 and the years around it, and at the end he says: Well, this is why it happened. I quite like that because his view is that politicians don’t make history, the great men don’t make history, the writers and journalists don’t make history though they all take credit for it post facto . Actually, what makes history is the work of the people. It’s a demotic theory of history, though not necessarily a socialist view. Yes, but as a collective will. The tiny little things like Tushin the gunner who does this, or someone at Borodino who does that. But underlying that there is a sort of unremarked, subconscious collective will at work. It’s the will of the people. So, for instance, when the French occupy Moscow, he says: ‘It lies there like a fatally wounded beast, licking its wounds for five weeks and then, suddenly, with no new reason, the French turn tail and make a dash back to the West.’ When he says ‘no new reason’ he is suggesting that the insignificant soldiers, workers and peasants who are teeming through the pages of War and Peace , somehow come together in an expression of the collective will. In the case of Moscow, they ‘spontaneously’ set fire to the city. Tolstoy’s view is that the great men, like Kutuzov, move in tune with the laws of history. The foolish men, like Napoleon, try to change them, and we see the calamitous results of that. In the occupation of Moscow we see a bit of this Szamuely thesis cropping up again. We see that ‘Asiatic will’ surfacing, that steeliness that has been left with them from the Mongols. One of Napoleon ’s own generals says: ‘These people are Scythians.’ For me it’s just a bit too close to historical determinism, historical inevitability. It smacks of Hegel’s ineluctable march of history. Hegel said worldwide communism was inevitable. Well…"

"I suppose that, as a middle-aged man, I react differently to Tolstoy than I did when I first read War and Peace at about 15. At first reading, I was entirely captivated by the concluding essay at the end of the book, where Tolstoy writes about historical determinism. I bought that then, and it was only really in my twenties that I rebelled against it. I’m an atheist, but I don’t reject Christianity. I have a totally different view from someone like my friend Richard Dawkins, or the late lamented Christopher Hitchens. I rather like Christianity, and am attracted by many aspects of Christ’s teachings. What I like about Tolstoy is the kind of Christian fundamentalism – not the sort that one encounters in the Bible Belt, but the kind that takes Christianity very seriously. The other thing about Tolstoy is that he left this [faith] until late in life. I do think that it’s a good strategy to be more worldly in your youth and more pious in old age. I’m working on that myself."

"I love Tolstoy. He was one of the most amazing men. He was born an aristocrat, he was a gambler, a drunk, and a womanizer, but he gave it all up. The first book he wrote was one of the first books to have looked through the eyes of children and how they see the world. Up until then, books had been written about kids but always through the eyes of an adult. War and Peace was groundbreaking in its age, because up until then, war had always been something that was glorified; he looked at war through the psychology of the people experiencing it, and the way they expressed that experience in their lives. That was a profound breakthrough. For instance, he shows people suffering from post-traumatic stress. He ended up quite a devout Christian. He wrote a book called The Kingdom of God is Within You , which is the hardest thing in the world to read—I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. But it’s a profound book, because what he said was that for thousands of years now, humanity has been finding the bad guy, the enemy, and then, to create peace, has been fighting the enemy to destroy them. However, in the very process of doing this, we end up just like our enemy. Today, it’s still going on. Therefore, the way to peace is first to turn within, realise that the kingdom of God lies within; when we realise our own inner peace, then we can go about changing the world. Profound. “Historians talk about the individual and the individual actor who changes history. But that’s not truly what happens” Another area in which he was way ahead of his time—and this can be found in War and Peace— is in his views about the movement of history and the march of history through time. He says historians talk about the individual and the individual actor who changes history. But that’s not truly what happens, because we’re all a product of the age and times we live in. We’re constrained by that, and the actions we take are governed by those historical flows, and the relationships that exist within societies. So, for example, without the First World War, and the Great Depression, Hitler would have never risen. Tolstoy was commenting on Napoleon in his era, but he was looking at the history, which brings about the environment that causes the ability for individuals to affect history. This fits back into the systems work we do at the Institute for Economics and Peace. We often focus on the individual, say, President Trump and his election, or his losing an election. But what really caused him to be elected was the relationships and flows that caused a man like that to be able to rise in the first place. That’s a much deeper philosophical and complex problem than just saying, ‘Oh, gee, here’s this guy. He’s a lunatic. He is in power, we have to re-educate the people who voted for the lunatic.’"

"The reason I chose War and Peace is because it is the greatest novel of all time and I still think it is even after reading it five times. It’s an historical novel, as are my other choices Vanity Fair and obviously the Georgette Heyer. Tolstoy is writing 50 years after the event. What he is writing about is the deliverance of the Russian nation from Napoleon . As a novelist, when you begin to write in this era it is like the elephant in the room, especially if you love it as much as I do. Tolstoy isn’t just the great chronicler of what it felt like to be under fire, he also has the ability to make us feel the emotion of his characters with a single word or gesture. Not at all. It’s impossible for a modern novelist to write at that length, especially about philosophical issues . I just don’t think readers would get through it. But I also decided that while I was writing I would not look at it. I was worried that I might start to take on Tolstoy’s style! I had the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky and thought I would save that up for a treat at the end. The Pevear and Volokonsky is interesting because it is more modern and flows better, but I suppose what you lose with a new translation is the period feel. With the old translation the translation already reads like an historical novel. It has this archaic feel which I always felt was fitting because it is an historical novel itself ­– but maybe in time the new translation will have that kind of feel."

"In my view, this is the greatest novel ever written. It’s just so rich. I’ve read it, I think, four or five times, and I tend to read it alternatively in English and French. I quite often read the Pleiade edition , but I’m reading the new Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky edition —which is fascinating—the first three or four pages are in French. In the Louise and Aylmer Maude edition , which I publish at Everyman, it’s all of course in English, but Richard and Larissa have kept Tolstoy’s French, which is quite interesting. As a book it’s just wonderful. And Tolstoy is such a huge figure. Five or six years ago I took a group of writers, supported by the British Council and Russian Ministry of Culture, to visit Turgenev, Chekhov and Tolstoy’s houses in Russia . We were at Yasnaya Polyana for Tolstoy’s birthday. “I genuinely believe that there is a European culture and sensibility—both artistic and literary” In Tolstoy’s lifetime there was always a concert of a peasant orchestra on his birthday and the birthday concert tradition continues. We were staying at one of those awful Soviet-type hotels, five miles away, and when everyone went back to change, I thought: hang on, I may never be in this garden again. So I stayed in the garden after it shut and snooped. I like snooping. I peered into barns at old sleighs and carts that the great man must have used. They were all still there. I have been reading and rereading Russian writers , since I came back across Russia from India and Afghanistan when I was very young. We have an advisory editorial board. We try simply to review what is the greatest, the best translation around. Quite often it will be a translation from the 20th century—so Archibald Colquhoun or William Weaver from Italian, or Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin from French. Yes. Constance Garnett, whose translations of Chekhov’s stories we publish , writes so beautifully, but her accuracy is much less than modern translators like Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky whose translation of Chekhov’s complete short novels we publish. Translators are absolutely the unsung heroes of literature. They’re the most wonderful, important people. It’s great that the cultural world, and the publishing industry, is giving them much greater credit nowadays. I’m reading an absolutely brilliant new translation of Doctor Zhivago at the moment, by an English member of the Pasternak family, though sadly I am quite unable to read Russian. It’s breathtaking."

"Next we move to War and Peace . Which comes out of Potemkin and Catherine. I don’t know how objective it is. It’s a wonderful book on the first quarter – it ends I think just before the Decembrists’ Revolt of 1825, so just after the Vienna Congress – the first 20 or 30 years of Russia in the 19th century. One doesn’t have to invent the bicycle, there is one: it’s War and Peace . It’s about how Russia won the Napoleonic wars, and moved into the first row of nations who dealt with European history. It’s set during the peak of Russian culture, the age of Pushkin, who created the modern Russian language. It’s the peak. The high modern, the Golden Age of Russian history, literature , spirit, thought, freedom, and so on. Maybe historically not very exact, but brilliant, genius, great. Tolstoy invented probably 90 per cent of that Russia of the Napoleonic wars and afterwards. But it gives the flavour, it doesn’t matter whether it’s historically truthful or not – the flavour, the ambience is there. The only thing I would recommend to modern readers is to skip all those parts – which are completely separate from the other parts of the book – where Tolstoy is philosophising about the role of the individual in history. It’s maybe 15 per cent of the book, in separate chapters, and I would definitely recommend to skip those because they are not interesting today."

"Partly because it’s one of my favourite books of all time and partly because I think it counts as a historical novel in my definition, which is very broad and is simply a novel that shows people’s lives from an earlier time. I don’t like the idea of containing historical fiction in this genre ghetto where you are sort of writing for the women’s market and you’ve got a lot of patronising. I love this idea that Tolstoy is telling this story from the past and meditating on what he thinks the nature of history is about. His idea is that it is very much an accident that things happen, and there are these small things – someone is in a bad mood at the time – that have vast repercussions across people’s lives. I love that. There are these Napoleon figures, these very vulgar kind of post-revolutionary French figures who are destroying the old Europe and who are mixed up with our heroes and heroines living their lives. I think it’s the most amazing mixture. Yes, absolutely. It’s a panorama and you see everything from these epic battle scenes to a magical sleigh ride at night in the snow, which was the most beautiful and lyrical passage. You do have the sense of the whole of society interacting as they fall in love or their fortunes change because of the war; you see things on a big scale as well as a small scale at the same time."

"The last hundred pages are dull, but if you can stick out the first 1200, then you might as well stick out the last. For the first 1200, it’s a kind of ebb and flow between war and peace, and I think each is equally engaging. When you get to the war parts, Tolstoy is always having the characters think about how they can talk about war. So Nikolai Rostov has these very heroic ideas of going into battle, but then it’s not quite as heroic as he imagined, it doesn’t go as well as he thought, and then when he’s asked to talk about it he realises his listener seems disappointed, so he very quickly slips into a standard heroic war tale. Tolstoy didn’t fight in the Napoleonic wars, but he did fight in the Crimean war, so he drew on his experiences in that when he wrote War and Peace . That’s true of most of the choices here. Tolstoy is writing in the 1860s about the beginning of the nineteenth century, Homer is writing about an imaginary war, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is published in 1961 and it’s about the Second World War . Penelope Farmer was writing a good fifty years after the First World War . I think people do write about previous wars and partly it’s a way of avoiding contemporary rawnesses. The difference is writing with hindsight. It’s easier to tie up the pieces and draw some kind of moral, if you think that war literature can do that. There’s a great writer called Tim O’Brien—one of his books, The Things They Carried , nearly got on my list—who said that if you think there is anything uplifting about any war story, you’ve been the victim of a very old lie."