Posts Tagged ‘Combat Stress’

  1. Stiff Upper Lips

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    October 28, 2014 by Lydia Syson

    A few days ago, a new opera called Shell Shock premiered in Brussels, just one of the huge number of commemorative events marking the anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. Works of art such as Pat Barker’s mesmerising Regeneration trilogy have already made a huge contribution to our understanding of shell shock, though sadly, not enough to ensure we are dealing with it effectively today.  You don’t ever get over it’ was the headline of a disturbing article in last week’s Guardian about the treatment – or non-treatment – of combat stress today, through interviews with British soldiers who have served in Afghanistan, Iraq and Northern Ireland. Names change – in the 19th century it was known keep reading


  2. Darkling I listen

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    July 3, 2014 by Lydia Syson

    I’ve only heard a nightingale sing once, in a wood near Bristol, when I was in my early twenties.  Last Sunday I stood in the dark and listened to a recording made in 1942, in Surrey.  This nightingale was ‘pouring forth its soul abroad’ – rather more widely even than Keats’ bird, since it was being broadcast live by the BBC – in a short-lived annual tradition that was about to end.  It was broken that night because the engineer realised that his new high-fidelity microphone was also picking up the growing hum of a flight of bombers.  Nearly two hundred aircraft were heading for Germany, and he did not want to warn the enemy of the impending raid.  Fortunately he continued to record, if not to broadcast, and  the result is now part of The Wind Tunnel Project. keep reading



“A mesmerising portrait of a family unravelling” THE TIMES (Best historical fiction in 2018)

“Powerful, intense and beautiful” HISTORICAL NOVEL REVIEW

“This tense, evocative, richly-imagined novel conjures the voices of a strange time and place, and makes them universal” EMMA DARWIN

“Syson brings history alive” THE OBSERVER

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