On Art and War and Terror Tapa dura - 2009

On Art and War and Terror Alex Danchev 'The imaginative transformation of human life is the means by which we can most truly grasp and comprehend it.' That is the credo and manifesto of this book. The words are Seamus Heaney's. 'Whatever is given', he writes in his own idiom, 'can always be reimagined, however four-square/Plank-thick, hull-stupid and out of its time/It happens to be.' The essays collected here seek to investigate these claims. They put the imagination to work, in the service of historical, political and ethical inquiry. Employing its second sight, they piggy-back on its moral benefits. The nobility of poetry, says Wallace Stevens, is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. This is a book about violence of both kinds. It traffics in war poetry, war photography, war films, war stories, war diaries and the like, but also in war itself: in blood - blood like a carwash, as Christopher Logue's Homer has it - and therefore in political legitimacy, moral authority, civility, depravity, terror, torture, honour and conscience; not to speak of strange things like active passivity and senseless kindness. The violence within is illuminating. The violence without is unrelenting. We need all the protection we can get. Alex Danchev is Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of a number of widely acclaimed biographies, of Field Marshal Sir John Dill, Oliver Franks, Basil Liddell Hart and Georges Braque, and co-editor of the bestselling War Diaries of Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke.