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Podcast: Arts & Ideas
Episode: Sword to Pen. Redcoat and the rise of the military memoir
Description: New Generation Thinker Emma Butcher on the first soldier memoirs to talk about pain, terror and trauma.
The Napoleonic Wars, like all wars, had their celebrities. Chief among them, Wellington and Napoleon, whose petty rivalry and military bravado ensured their status as household names long after Waterloo. But these wars also saw the rise of a new genre of personal and emotional war literature which took the public by storm. The writers were foot soldiers rather than officers, infantrymen like George Gleig and John Malcolm. Both fought in some of the most decisive battles on the Continent but it...