THE HISTORY ESSAY
Vera Brittain, pictured in 1918 while serving as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse. Her fulminations against “shirkers” who didn’t answer the call to fight in 1914 are strikingly absent from her celebrated pacifist memoir Testament of Youth
LOVE, LOSS AND DISTORTED MEMORIES GETTY IMAGES
We’ve allowed memoirs to shape our perception of the First World War without paying due attention to their drawbacks for the historian By Mark Bostridge
BBC History Magazine
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