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Mark Gatiss's fantastic theatrical production of Dickens's classic winter ghost story.

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Miserly Ebenezer Scrooge needs some CBeebies magic to help him share the joy of Christmas!

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A look at the life of William Shakespeare, his place and time and the work he produced.

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Orson Welles stars in and directs a controversial version of Shakespeare's play.

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Dr Stephanie Forward explains the key ideas and influences of Romanticism, and considers their place in the work of writers including Wordsworth, Blake, P B Shelley and Keats.

Today the word 'romantic' evokes images of love and sentimentality, but the term 'Romanticism' has a much wider meaning. It covers a range of developments in art, literature, music and philosophy, spanning the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The 'Romantics' would not have used the term themselves: the label was applied retrospectively, from around the middle of the 19th century.

In 1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau declared in The Social Contract: 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.' During the Romantic period major transitions took place in society, as dissatisfied intellectuals and artists challenged the Establishment. In England, the Romantic poets were at the very heart of this movement. They were inspired by a desire for liberty, and they denounced the exploitation of the poor. There was an emphasis on the importance of the individual; a conviction that people should follow ideals rather than imposed conventions and rules. The Romantics renounced the rationalism and order associated with the preceding Enlightenment era, stressing the importance of expressing authentic personal feelings. They had a real sense of responsibility to their fellow men: they felt it was their duty to use their poetry to inform and inspire others, and to change society.

Revolution

When reference is made to Romantic verse, the poets who generally spring to mind are William Blake (1757-1827), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), George Gordon, 6th Lord Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and John Keats (1795-1821). These writers had an intuitive feeling that they were 'chosen' to guide others through the tempestuous period of change.

This was a time of physical confrontation; of violent rebellion in parts of Europe and the New World. Conscious of anarchy across the English Channel, the British government feared similar outbreaks. The early Romantic poets tended to be supporters of the French Revolution, hoping that it would bring about political change; however, the bloody Reign of Terror shocked them profoundly and affected their views. In his youth William Wordsworth was drawn to the Republican cause in France, until he gradually became disenchanted with the Revolutionaries.

Painting of the storming of the Bastille, 1789

Depiction of the storming of the Bastille, Paris - the event that triggered the French Revolution.

Usage terms © De Agostini Picture Library
Held by© De Agostini Picture Library

The imagination

The Romantics were not in agreement about everything they said and did: far from it! Nevertheless, certain key ideas dominated their writings. They genuinely thought that they were prophetic figures who could interpret reality. The Romantics highlighted the healing power of the imagination, because they truly believed that it could enable people to transcend their troubles and their circumstances. Their creative talents could illuminate and transform the world into a coherent vision, to regenerate mankind spiritually. In A Defence of Poetry (1821), Shelley elevated the status of poets: 'They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit...'. He declared that 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'. This might sound somewhat pretentious, but it serves to convey the faith the Romantics had in their poetry.

Manuscript of P B Shelley's 'The Masque of Anarchy'

P B Shelley's manuscript of 'The Masque of Anarchy', 1819, was a reaction of furious outrage at the Peterloo Massacre. An avowedly political poem, it praises the non-violence of the Manchester protesters when faced with the aggression of the state.

The marginalised and oppressed

Wordsworth was concerned about the elitism of earlier poets, whose highbrow language and subject matter were neither readily accessible nor particularly relevant to ordinary people. He maintained that poetry should be democratic; that it should be composed in 'the language really spoken by men' (Preface to Lyrical Ballads [1802]). For this reason, he tried to give a voice to those who tended to be marginalised and oppressed by society: the rural poor; discharged soldiers; 'fallen' women; the insane; and children.

Blake was radical in his political views, frequently addressing social issues in his poems and expressing his concerns about the monarchy and the church. His poem ' London ' draws attention to the suffering of chimney-sweeps, soldiers and prostitutes.

Lyrical Ballads: 1800 edition

In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth writes that he has 'taken as much pains to avoid [poetic diction] as others ordinarily take to produce it', trying instead to 'bring [his] language near to the language of men'.

William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience

'London' from William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1794. Blake emphasises the injustice of late 18th-century society and the desperation of the poor.

Children, nature and the sublime

For the world to be regenerated, the Romantics said that it was necessary to start all over again with a childlike perspective. They believed that children were special because they were innocent and uncorrupted, enjoying a precious affinity with nature. Romantic verse was suffused with reverence for the natural world. In Coleridge's 'Frost at Midnight' (1798) the poet hailed nature as the 'Great universal Teacher!' Recalling his unhappy times at Christ's Hospital School in London, he explained his aspirations for his son, Hartley, who would have the freedom to enjoy his childhood and appreciate his surroundings. The Romantics were inspired by the environment, and encouraged people to venture into new territories - both literally and metaphorically. In their writings they made the world seem a place with infinite, unlimited potential.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, A Walking Tour of Cumbria

In August 1802, Samuel Taylor Coleridge set out from his home at Greta Hall, Keswick, for a week's solo walking-tour in the nearby Cumbrian mountains. He kept detailed notes of the landscape around him, drawing rough sketches and maps. These notes and sketches are in Notebook No 2, one of 64 notebooks Coleridge kept between 1794 and his death.

A key idea in Romantic poetry is the concept of the sublime. This term conveys the feelings people experience when they see awesome landscapes, or find themselves in extreme situations which elicit both fear and admiration. For example, Shelley described his reaction to stunning, overwhelming scenery in the poem 'Mont Blanc' (1816).

Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

In this 1757 essay, the philosopher Edmund Burke discusses the attraction of the immense, the terrible and the uncontrollable. The work had a profound influence on the Romantic poets.

The second-generation Romantics

Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge were first-generation Romantics, writing against a backdrop of war. Wordsworth, however, became increasingly conservative in his outlook: indeed, second-generation Romantics, such as Byron, Shelley and Keats, felt that he had 'sold out' to the Establishment. In the suppressed Dedication to (1819-1824) Byron criticised the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, and the other 'Lakers', Wordsworth and Coleridge (all three lived in the Lake District). Byron also vented his spleen on the English Foreign Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh, denouncing him as an 'intellectual eunuch', a 'bungler' and a 'tinkering slavemaker' (stanzas 11 and 14). Although the Romantics stressed the importance of the individual, they also advocated a commitment to mankind. Byron became actively involved in the struggles for Italian nationalism and the liberation of Greece from Ottoman rule.

Notorious for his sexual exploits, and dogged by debt and scandal, Byron quitted Britain in 1816. Lady Caroline Lamb famously declared that he was 'Mad, bad and dangerous to know.' Similar accusations were pointed at Shelley. Nicknamed 'Mad Shelley' at Eton, he was sent down from Oxford for advocating atheism. He antagonised the Establishment further by his criticism of the monarchy, and by his immoral lifestyle.

Letter from Lord Byron about his memoirs, 29 October 1819

In this letter to his publisher, John Murray, Byron notes the poor reception of the first two cantos of Don Juan, but states that he has written a hundred stanzas of a third canto. He also states that he is leaving his memoirs to his friend George Moore, to be read after his death, but that this text does not include details of his love affairs.

Female poets

Female poets also contributed to the Romantic movement, but their strategies tended to be more subtle and less controversial. Although Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855) was modest about her writing abilities, she produced poems of her own; and her journals and travel narratives certainly provided inspiration for her brother. Women were generally limited in their prospects, and many found themselves confined to the domestic sphere; nevertheless, they did manage to express or intimate their concerns. For example, Mary Alcock (c. 1742-1798) penned 'The Chimney Sweeper's Complaint'. In 'The Birth-Day', Mary Robinson (1758-1800) highlighted the enormous discrepancy between life for the rich and the poor. Gender issues were foregrounded in 'Indian Woman's Death Song' by Felicia Hemans (1793-1835).

The Gothic

Reaction against the Enlightenment was reflected in the rise of the Gothic novel. The most popular and well-paid 18th-century novelist, Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), specialised in 'the hobgoblin-romance'. Her fiction held particular appeal for frustrated middle-class women who experienced a vicarious frisson of excitement when they read about heroines venturing into awe-inspiring landscapes. She was dubbed 'Mother Radcliffe' by Keats, because she had such an influence on Romantic poets. The Gothic genre contributed to Coleridge's Christabel (1816) and Keats's 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' (1819). Mary Shelley (1797-1851) blended realist, Gothic and Romantic elements to produce her masterpiece Frankenstein (1818), in which a number of Romantic aspects can be identified. She quotes from Coleridge's Romantic poem The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. In the third chapter Frankenstein refers to his scientific endeavours being driven by his imagination. The book raises worrying questions about the possibility of 'regenerating' mankind; but at several points the world of nature provides inspiration and solace.

The Mysteries of Udolpho

The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe was one of the most popular and influential Gothic novels of the late 18th century.

The Byronic hero

Romanticism set a trend for some literary stereotypes. Byron's Childe Harold (1812-1818) described the wanderings of a young man, disillusioned with his empty way of life. The melancholy, dark, brooding, rebellious 'Byronic hero', a solitary wanderer, seemed to represent a generation, and the image lingered. The figure became a kind of role model for youngsters: men regarded him as 'cool' and women found him enticing! Byron died young, in 1824, after contracting a fever. This added to the 'appeal'. Subsequently a number of complex and intriguing heroes appeared in novels: for example, Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Edward Rochester in Charlotte Brontë's (both published in 1847).

Illustrations to Wuthering Heights by Clare Leighton

The Byronic hero influenced Emily Brontë's portrayal of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. This 1931 edition of Brontë's novel is illustrated with wood engravings by Clare Leighton.

Contraries

Romanticism offered a new way of looking at the world, prioritising imagination above reason. There was, however, a tension at times in the writings, as the poets tried to face up to life's seeming contradictions. Blake published Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1794). Here we find two different perspectives on religion in 'The Lamb' and 'The Tyger'. The simple vocabulary and form of 'The Lamb' suggest that God is the beneficent, loving Good Shepherd. In stark contrast, the creator depicted in ' The Tyger' is a powerful blacksmith figure. The speaker is stunned by the exotic, frightening animal, posing the rhetorical question: 'Did he who made the Lamb make thee?' In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793) Blake asserted: 'Without contraries is no progression' (stanza 8).

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake

William Blake was deeply critical of traditional religion but greatly admired John Milton. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell includes references to Milton and Paradise Lost and the book ends with 'A Song of Liberty', which calls for revolt against the tyrannies of church and state.

Wordsworth's ' Tintern Abbey' (1798) juxtaposed moments of celebration and optimism with lamentation and regret. Keats thought in terms of an opposition between the imagination and the intellect. In a letter to his brothers, in December 1817, he explained what he meant by the term ' Negative Capability ': 'that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason' (22 December). Keats suggested that it is impossible for us to find answers to the eternal questions we all have about human existence. Instead, our feelings and imaginations enable us to recognise Beauty, and it is Beauty that helps us through life's bleak moments. Life involves a delicate balance between times of pleasure and pain. The individual has to learn to accept both aspects: '"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know' ('Ode on a Grecian Urn' [1819]).

Manuscript of 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' by John Keats

'Ode on a Grecian Urn' from a manuscript copy believed to be in the hand of George Keats, the poet's brother.

The premature deaths of Byron, Shelley and Keats contributed to their mystique. As time passed they attained iconic status, inspiring others to make their voices heard. The Romantic poets continue to exert a powerful influence on popular culture. Generations have been inspired by their promotion of self-expression, emotional intensity, personal freedom and social concern.

Footnotes

[1] Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's poetry and prose: authoritative texts, criticisms, ed. by Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York; London: Norton, c.1977), p.485.

Dr Stephanie Forward is a lecturer, specializing in English Literature. She has been involved in two important collaborative projects between the Open University and the BBC: The Big Read, and the television series The Romantics, and was a contributor to the British Library's Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians site and to the 20th century site. Stephanie has an extensive publications record. She also edited the anthology Dreams, Visions and Realities; co-edited (with Ann Heilmann) Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand, and penned the script for the C.D. Blenheim Palace: The Churchills and their Palace.

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Hisao Horiyama first learned how he was due to die from a simple slip of white paper. On it were written three options: to volunteer willingly, to simply volunteer, or to say no.

But as a 21-year-old airman caught in the thick of Japan's faltering war with the allies, he knew there was only one choice. Without hesitation, he agreed to fly his plane into the side of a US warship.

With that one act of destruction, he would end his life and the lives of many others, in the name of his emperor as a member of an elite, and supposedly invincible, group of young men whose sacrifice would deliver victory to Japan: the kamikaze.

Horiyama was a young soldier in an artillery unit of the Japanese imperial army when he was drafted into the air force.

It was late 1944, and the tide of war was turning against Japan. In the newly formed kamikaze, Tokyo's military leaders envisioned a dedicated unit of ideologically conditioned warriors willing to die a glorious death for their empire.

As a devoted subject of the emperor, Horiyama longed for his moment of glory.

"We finished our training and were given a slip of white paper giving us three options: to volunteer out of a strong desire, to simply volunteer, or to decline," Horiyama, now 92, told the Guardian at his home in Tokyo.

A model fighter plane sits on a bookcase in the living room of the apartment he shares with his wife. In one corner are cardboard boxes stuffed with black-and-white photographs of kamikaze pilots, veterans' newsletters, journals and newspaper cuttings.

"When we graduated from army training school the Showa emperor [Hirohito] visited our unit on a white horse. I thought then that this was a sign that he was personally requesting our services. I knew that I had no choice but to die for him.

"At that time we believed that the emperor and nation of Japan were one and the same."

By January 1945 more than 500 kamikaze planes had taken part in suicide missions, and many more followed as fears rose of an impending US-led invasion of the Japanese mainland. By the end of the war, more than 3,800 pilots had died. Although there are still disputes over their effectiveness, suicide missions sank or caused irreparable damage to dozens of US and allied ships.

For the suicide attacks to succeed, the air force and navy needed a new crop of young pilots, many of them taken from other parts of the military and from Japan's best universities.

"We didn't think too much [about dying]," Horiyama said. "We were trained to suppress our emotions. Even if we were to die, we knew it was for a worthy cause. Dying was the ultimate fulfillment of our duty, and we were commanded not to return. We knew that if we returned alive that our superiors would be angry."

Like other pilots selected for suicide missions, Horiyama was asked to write a will and a letter that would be sent to parents when their mission was completed.

"I was a disrespectful child and got poor grades at school," he said. "I told my father that I was sorry for being such a bad student, and for crashing three planes during training exercises. And I was sorry that the course of the war seemed to be turning against Japan. I wanted to prove myself to him, and that's why I volunteered to join the special attack unit.

"But my mother was upset. Just before she died she told me that she would never have forgiven my father if I had died in a kamikaze attack. So I'm grateful to the emperor that he stopped the war."

Japan was still flying suicide missions up to the moment, on 15 August 1945, when Hirohito announced to a shattered people traumatised by nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Japan was surrendering.

"I couldn't hear the radio announcement on NHK very well because of the static," Horiyama said. "One person started crying loudly. That's when I knew we had lost the war.

"I felt bad that I hadn't been able to sacrifice myself for my country. My comrades who had died would be remembered in infinite glory, but I had missed my chance to die in the same way. I felt like I had let everyone down."

That was Hisao Horiyama's story. But not every would-be kamikaze was as fervent in their belief in death for the motherland.

When Takehiko Ena learned he had been chosen to fly a suicide mission he greeted the news in a way he still finds confusing.

"I felt the blood drain from my face," he told the Guardian. "The other pilots and I congratulated each other when the order came through that we were going to attack. It sounds strange now, as there was nothing to celebrate."

Ena, 92, had been drafted into the depleted ranks of the navy as a 20-year-old economics student at the prestigious Waseda university in Tokyo. He was sent to join a squadron of pilots in Kyushu, Japan's southernmost main island, in April 1945, when the kamikaze were at their most active.

He was to pilot a crew of three aboard a plane with an 800kg [1,763-pound] bomb strapped to its undercarriage. The aircraft would have fuel only for a one-way flight.

They were part of Operation Kikusui (floating chrysanthemum), an ambitious suicide-bombing mission against the allied ships bombarding Japanese forces in the Battle of Okinawa, one of the bloodiest battles in the Pacific theatre.

By the latter stages of the war, Japan was relying on ageing planes that had been stripped and adapted for suicide missions. Many failed to start or encountered engine trouble en route to their targets. Most of those that got within striking distance of allied warships were shot down before they made impact.

It was this dismal mechanical record - a reflection of the desperate lengths to which Japan's military leaders were willing to go to win the war - that was to be Ena's salvation.

On 28 April 1945 he steered his aircraft along the runway at Kushira airfield in Kagoshima prefecture, but failed to get airborne. His second mission ended in failure when engine trouble forced him to make an emergency landing at a Japanese army base, still carrying the bomb intended for the enemy.

Two weeks later, on 11 May, he was steeling himself for a third attempt, accompanied by a 20-year-old co-pilot and an 18-year-old communications officer.

"On the surface, we were doing it for our country," Ena said. "We made ourselves believe that we had been chosen to make this sacrifice. I just wanted to protect the father and mother I loved. And we were all scared."

Early into what should have been his final flight, engine trouble forced Ena's plane into the sea. The three men survived and swam to nearby Kuroshima island, where they stayed for two-and-a-half months before being picked up by a Japanese submarine.

Shortly afterwards, Japan was a defeated nation. Ena's relief that the war was over gave way to optimism about the future, even as Japan set about rebuilding its devastated cities and counted the human cost of its militarist adventure on the Asian mainland.

"We felt sadness about the friends we had lost during the war, but we were also trying to envision how we would rebuild Japan," he said.

That meant embracing the country's new, US-written constitution, whose "pacifist" article nine restricts Japan's military to a strictly defensive role.

He bristles when asked about attempts by Japan's conservative prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to reinterpret the clause to allow troops to fight alongside allies overseas for the first time since the conflict that almost took his life.

"For 70 years we have been protected by a peace-oriented constitution," he said. "I'm very grateful that we haven't gone to war [in that time.] The Japanese people should be happy about that."
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The last kamikaze: two Japanese pilots tell how they cheated death

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Hisao Horiyama first learned how he was due to die from a simple slip of white paper. On it were written three options: to volunteer willingly, to simply volunteer, or to say no. But as a 21-year-old airman caught in the thick of Japan's faltering war with the allies, he knew there was only one choice.

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Flight Lieutenant Haruo Araki's hand shook as he composed a last letter to his wife of just a month:
Are you well? It is now a month since that day. The happy dream is over. Tomorrow I will dive my plane into an enemy ship. I will cross the river into the other world, taking some Yankees with me. When I look back, I see that I was very cold-hearted to you. After I had been cruel to you, I used to regret it. Please forgive me. When I think of your future, and the long life ahead, it tears at my heart. Please remain steadfast and live happily. After my death, please take care of my father for me. I, who have lived for the eternal principles of justice, will forever protect this nation from the enemies that surround us. Commander of the Air Unit Eternity Haruo Araki
The letter was written at Chiran Air Base, Kyushu, on the evening of May 10, 1945. Haruo had already penned a note to his father, mentioning that he had flown over the family house at the end of April, circling many times in the hope that his father might see him. But he had not looked up from his work in the fields. "Father," wrote Haruo, "I was unable to catch your attention." Having sealed both letters, Haruo handed them to a visiting journalist who had promised to deliver them in person.

Kamikaze pilots of the 72nd Shinbu Squadron on May 26, 1945, the day before launching attacks off Okinawa.

Early the following morning, the journalist took some photos of the airman before he left on his mission. One was with his two group leaders: all three were 21 years old and had graduated from the Military Academy in the 57th Class. Another showed Haruo giving the final address to his fellow kamikazes (named after the "divine wind" that had destroyed the Mongol fleet in the thirteenth century, thus saving Japan from invasion.) He was smiling, "conscious of the camera." On his forehead he was wearing a white headband with Japan's rising-sun emblem. The students at the girls' school near the base had "cut their fingers and filled in the red sun with their own blood." Copies of these photos were later given to Haruo's wife.

Finally, at 6 a.m., Haruo took off in the lead plane, one of 150 aircraft to take part in the sixth mass kamikaze attack against Allied shipping near Okinawa on May 10-11. Haruo's fate is unknown. It is just possible, however, that his plane was one of two that struck Vice Admiral Mitscher's flagship aircraft carrier USS Bunker Hill on May 11, causing extensive fires and killing 396 men (including fourteen of Mitscher's staff, most to smoke inhalation) and wounding 264, the worst casualties since the USS Franklin. Though still afloat, the USS Bunker Hill was out of action for the rest of the war, forcing Mitscher to transfer his flag to USS Enterprise.

The USS Bunker Hill in flames after being hit by Kamikazes on May 11, 1945. Photo by the US Naval History and Heritage Command

Haruo was one of more than 2,000 Japanese servicemen who perished in kamikaze attacks during the three month long battle for the island of Okinawa, located just 400 miles south of mainland Japan, that raged from April 1 to June 22, 1945. They were at the centre of a desperate and ill-thought out strategy by the Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo-known as Operation Ten-Go-to defeat the next phase of the American advance in the Pacific. "I firmly believed," wrote the navy's chief of operations, "that Okinawa alone was the decisive battleground where we would be able to reverse the war situation." The plan was to sink so many American ships that the US Fifth Fleet would withdraw, abandoning its troops on Okinawa who could then be mopped up by the large Japanese garrison. It failed, though various forms of kamikaze attack-including planes, manned rockets and human torpedoes-did sink 36 American ships and damage a further 368, inflicting 10,000 casualties (half of them killed.)

To the Allies, steeped in the Judaeo-Christian tradition of the sanctity of life, the apparent willingness of Japanese servicemen like Araki to carry out suicide attacks was profoundly shocking. But then, as scholars of the kamikaze point out, the word suicide in Japanese does not always have the same "immoral connotation" that it has in English. Two versions-jiketsu (self-determination) and jisai (self-judgement)-"suggest an honorable or laudable act done in the public interest." There is, moreover, no ethical or religious taboo regarding suicide in Japan's traditional religion of Shintoism. Instead, the Japanese samurai warrior code of bushido-heavily influenced by Shintoism, as well as Buddhism and even Confucianism-revered self-sacrifice and fighting to the bitter end for emperor and country.

To surrender, on the other hand, was seen as dishonourable, hence the contempt the Japanese felt for prisoners of war. Japanese soldiers believed that when they fell on the field of battle they would become kami, or gods, and join the nation's spirits at the Shinto shrine of Yasukuni in Tokyo. Hence the typical farewell from members of the Shimpū (Divine Wind) Special Attack Corps: "I'll meet you at the Yasukuni Shrine!"

Japanese high school girls wave farewell to departing Kamikaze pilots. Photo by Hayakawa from Wikimedia Commons.

At the time, Lieutenant Araki's wife Shigeko-who was carrying their child-was proud of her husband's sacrifice. "I thought it was natural that Haruo would die," she wrote later. "It would have been shameful for him to go on living." She herself had been trained at the factory where she worked to use sharpened bamboo spears on invading enemy soldiers, and would have had no compunction about killing the enemy. "It was for Japan," she explained later, "it was to preserve and protect the country. We were sending our loved ones off to die... It was the least we could do on the home front." Her chief concern was that his sacrifice had not been in vain, and that he had managed to sink a ship: "Otherwise," she wrote, "he still lies at the bottom of the cold Okinawan sea for nothing."

Meet the Author

Saul David is a professor of Military History at the University of Buckingham, and an award-winning military historian, and broadcaster. His most recent book, Crucible of Hell: The Heroism and Tragedy of Okinawa, 1945, was published on May 5, 2020.

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The Divine Wind: Japan's Kamikaze Pilots of World War II by Author Saul David, PhD | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans

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Flight Lieutenant Haruo Araki's hand shook as he composed a last letter to his wife of just a month: Are you well? It is now a month since that day. The happy dream is over. Tomorrow I will dive my plane into an enemy ship.

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' They simply adore Daddy here"... "Daddy was recognised everywhere ... his books sell like hot cakes ... " "Daddy made a speech, terrific applause, packed theatre stood and shouted." "People kept coming up and saying 'What a mind!' 'What a man!'"

This was JB Priestley's wife Jane, in September 1945, writing home to their six children from Russia, where they had been invited for the world premiere of An Inspector Calls. It opened first in Leningrad as "This You Will Not Forget", then in Moscow where it was retitled "He Came": the new titles were needed because in Russia an inspector is a government official (as in Gogol).

An Inspector Calls, set in 1912 in the household of a prosperous northern manufacturer, Arthur Birling, had been germinating in Priestley's mind since before the war. A mysterious stranger arrives during a family dinner and insists on interrogating each of the diners about the suicide of a young girl. Guilty secrets are revealed, and a heavy moral message is conveyed about communal responsibility. Priestley finished the play in the winter of 1944-5.

It was bold of him to have his first postwar play premiered in Russia as he was already considered a dangerous leftie in some quarters. In his wartime Postscripts for the BBC, hadn't he used the line "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" when calling for a better postwar world? The gleeful Tory rumour was that his new play had been rejected, but the truth was no suitable London theatre was available. His Russian translator approached Russian theatres, and it was snapped up.

The original Leningrad poster of An Inspector Calls

So in September, Priestley and Jane travelled to Moscow from Berlin in a Red Army Dakota piloted by a cheerful woman, without seats or seatbelts but with a metal bench, their luggage piled in the middle. "Everybody smoked; piano-accordions were brought out and played and sung to; bottles circulated; and there was a birthday-party atmosphere, very Russian and very genial," wrote Priestley.

Jane's letters were more specific. "No comfort, no lav, no sleep, no food," she wrote, and when they touched down at Minsk, "lav a wooden hut, so filthy as to seat, I had to do what others had done and use the floor!"

But they were royally welcomed by the Writers' Group of the Society for Cultural Relations with USSR, who included Alexei Tolstoy and Boris Pasternak. On Priestley's 51st birthday, 13 September, he finally saw his play in the Kamerny theatre, seated in a box. After the standing ovations the Priestleys dined with the company and were showered with gifts of champagne, chocolates and enough tobacco to last Jack till Christmas.

Jane, Priestley's second wife, was nothing like his more famous third wife, Jacquetta Hawkes. Jane was lively, half-Welsh, a graduate in French and Italian of Bedford College London, but also emotional and motherly, which was lucky as Priestley left the upbringing of the six children entirely to her. She had one daughter from her earlier marriage to Bevan Wyndham-Lewis; took on the two daughters of Priestley's first marriage; had one daughter by Priestley before their marriage and then another after. (Awkwardly, two of the five girls were called Barbara, so one had to become Angela.) The marriage was threatened for a time when the incorrigible Priestley became besotted by the 23-year-old actor Peggy Ashcroft. But after that affair ended, his reconciliation with Jane produced their only son, Tom, in 1932.

Two years after their return Priestley met the daunting, toweringly intellectual Hawkes. Jane took to her bed; the pair barely spoke; Tom acted as go-between. Priestley's dramatic output began to lose favour (like Rattigan's) as the era of Beckett and Osborne approached; Jacquetta had a big success with her book . By July 1953 she was the new Mrs JB Priestley. Happily, Jane eventually remarried too, to an ornithologist, David Bannerman, with whom she travelled the world for many years.

The 1930s had been the pinnacle of Priestley's success as novelist and social commentator. He bought the seven-bedroom 17th-century house in The Grove, Highgate, where Coleridge had died. In Coleridge's study Priestley wrote his first play, Dangerous Corner, and embarked on his classic English Journey. He worked at a frantic pace, 18 hours a day, and was "simply magnificent" in the view of the loyal Jane. She not only supervised their two households, ran his finances, travelled with him to Egypt and the US and was a diligent materfamilias (and governess), but she also published bird anthologies, volunteered as a probation officer and organised children's nurseries for the Women's Voluntary Service.

On 5 June 1940, her husband became the voice of the people. His Sunday evening radio Postscripts after the news bulletins, starting on Dunkirk day, rivalled Churchill's speeches for morale raising. Inspiring, anecdotal, his plain sentiments and comfortable Yorkshire voice drew 16 million listeners. After this war is over, he declared, we must care for the less fortunate, discard old class assumptions, build "a land fit for heroes" as was promised, and then betrayed, after the first war. Churchill's sour reaction ("Mr Priestley's war aims are not my war aims") helped silence Priestley's broadcasts after nine weeks.

But they gave a new significance to a key moment in An Inspector Calls, when the Inspector - who has already been dismissed as "a socialist or some sort of crank" - addresses the complacent Birlings, warning them that there are many people like the dead girl, "all intertwined with our lives ... We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish."

JB Priestley with his wife, Jane

At 21, Priestley had been wounded and buried alive twice in the trenches, and had seen the first world war as a class-driven catastrophe which saw his generation "sliced into sausage meat by idiots". He felt it had all happened again. Society must fundamentally change. His words undoubtedly influenced the Labour election victory in 1945 (when, oddly, he campaigned for Labour but stood as an Independent candidate in Cambridge and was wiped out by the sitting Tory MP).

That summer, Jane had been learning Russian, and her subsequent article in John Bull magazine rang with optimism ("there is a free, happy atmosphere ... " "this Russian journey leaves a glow in the mind and heart") reminiscent of Priestley's own Russian Journey. Her letters to the children are more candid, and it is she who notes the plugholes without plugs, the gargantuan lunches of "death-dealing" portions - fried eggs, vodka, cherry brandy, blinis and sour cream, pickled eggs, smoked fish, caviare, more vodka. Both were astonished to be allowed to stroll about unaccompanied - up and down Gorky Street they wandered, discovering "a sort of Fortnum & Mason extra high price shop" piled with caviar and chocolate.

But the inequality - the extra rations and perks for privileged generals and highly valued teachers, the discrimination against lowly office workers on overcrowded trams - was a real surprise. "In Britain everyone gets the same. We are far more equalitarian [sic] than they are," wrote Priestley. Jane noted the ragged and burdened elderly, "dead on their feet", women of 40 looking 70. "As for the sanitary conditions in their one-room flats," wrote Jane, "why they aren't all dead of dysentery is a wonder."

They saw some terrible theatre, but among the best was at the Moscow Arts Theatre adaptation of Gogol's Dead Souls, "a sort of Russian Pickwick ... Daddy laughed until he was nearly under his seat & tears rolled down his cheeks." Jane was the archetypal good companion, visiting collective farms and writers' cabins in pinewood forests ("indigestible lunch washed down with vodka. Not my idea of a day in the country"). She loved Tolstoy's simple Moscow house, kept by his granddaughter, but hated the new Bolshoi building ( "too gilt, too much, too glaring"). They were driven by some show-off drivers, Cossack in spirit, who scattered flocks of goats and made old women with market baskets jump for their lives. They flew across the stormy Caucasus, a landscape of destruction, of blown up, burnt out Nazi planes and tanks, cars and trees, destroyed mills and factories. They travelled for three days by train to Ukraine, kept awake by Red Army soldiers' footsteps on the train's roof. "There was nothing but ruin in all that journey," wrote Jane. Finally crossing the Dnieper River they came to Kiev before dawn, where blind beggars crouched outside garishly decorated baroque churches ("Daddy simply loathed it").

On the plane everybody smoked, piano-accordions were brought out, bottles were circulated

At their farewell dinner Ivan Maisky, who had been ambassador in London in 1940, recalled how England stood alone "and how much Daddy's postscripts did to hearten everyone," Jane records. "We left in a blaze of glory." As soon as they'd departed, Jane told the children she already missed the warmth and friendliness. "Query: how much does being clean matter? Dirt & indigestible food in Caucasus, continual upsets due to bad hygiene were very tiresome at the time but I shall always remember tremendous kindness & really overwhelming welcome."

The Russian people are the kind of people I like," Priestley wrote afterwards, "and we got on famously." He was later criticised by the Daily Express for not denouncing the Stalinist regime. He felt Marxism was too narrow a philosophy for "the expansive but brooding Russian soul" yet he found the writers and intellectuals he met quite unfettered, "more inclined to pity than to envy their colleagues in capitalist countries". He saw the young - unsullied by "over-stimulation of sex" - united by "a passionate desire to learn, to read and discuss, to enjoy great drama and music". What was uppermost in both Priestleys' minds was what the indomitable Russians had suffered, and the effort to rebuild life from the ruins. Priestley concluded: "I returned from their country far more hopeful and confident about the future of mankind." In this last letter to the children, daddy adds a single line: "Hold everything for arrival of great travellers bearing strange gifts." Tom, who had started at Bryanston school in his parents' absence, was given a Russian hat.

Tom, youngest of the three surviving offspring, is now 83, busy keeper of the Priestley flame, and as unlike his jowly, pipe-smoking father as can be. He is gay (which his father apparently found "difficult"), teetotal, read English at Cambridge (not at his father's college, Trinity Hall, but at King's), and became the distinguished editor of many classic films, including John Boorman's Deliverance, The Great Gatsby, and Michael Radford's White Mischief. In 1984, just before his father died, he made an affectionate TV film, Time and the Priestleys.

An Inspector Calls is his father's most performed play. The irony is that, while the Russians loved it (Literaturnaya Gazeta likened it to "traditional, realistic Soviet art"), it was far less appreciated at its London opening the following year. It starred Ralph Richardson, for whom the role of Inspector Goole had been written, and Alec Guinness. But on its 70th anniversary, An Inspector Calls is having a big revival. The BBC has made a new film version with David Thewlis as the Inspector and Ken Stott as Arthur Birley. And its most memorable stage incarnation, Stephen Daldry's 1992 National Theatre production with the amazing collapsing set, embarks on a UK tour next week. "There is still a sort of leftover snobbery," Tom says, "that he was not really one of us, because he was so popular. But his plays are always on somewhere."

An Inspector Calls, directed by Stephen Daldry, is touring from 5 September until the spring, and the BBC film will be broadcast on TV in September. aninspectorcalls.com

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How JB Priestley's Inspector first called on the USSR

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Priestley's first postwar play, An Inspector Calls, was premiered not in London but in Leningrad. Seventy years on, and in the runup to both the revival of Stephen Daldry's classic production on stage and a new BBC film version, the playwright's Russian journey seems more extraordinary than ever

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When director Stephen Daldry's dazzling production of "An Inspector Calls" first played Boston's Colonial Theatre in 1995, the British wunderkind (who went on to direct "Billy Elliot" and the Netflix series "The Crown") saw the play as a wake-up call for compassion during troubled times.

"It taps into millennial fears, a fin de siècle yearning for a new idea," he told me during an interview before the production opened at the Colonial. "God knows, I was brought up in a time when people were just making do. You just make the mess tolerable. But I think there is a feeling that you need to create a better society, that there is a yearning in the audience for new dreams, new ideas."

Well, the century is long over. The millennium is well underway. But Daldry's "Inspector" is calling ... again. The same National Theatre production - with its decorous doll house set perched precariously on stilts in a rain-drenched urban wasteland - returns to Boston, from March 14 to 24, presented by ArtsEmerson at the Cutler Majestic Theatre. And it could be that the play's message resonates more today than it did 24 years ago.

Written and first performed in 1945, J.B. Priestley's play is set in 1912, during the genteel Edwardian era a few years before World War I brought the British Empire to its knees. On the surface, it's a drawing room drama about a seemingly well-made family that breaks down when a mysterious constable appears. It was a huge success when it was first performed, but it fell out of fashion in the 1950s and 1960s and was dismissed as a stodgy, old-fashioned thriller. So when Daldry first approached London's National Theatre in 1992 with a proposal to revive the play, the powers-that-be questioned his choice. "They thought it was a terrible idea," Daldry told me.

Iain Gillie was production manager for the National Theatre at the time, and he scratched his head when the august institution decided to go ahead with the revival. "I didn't think it was relevant, to be honest," says Gillie, who has stayed on as production manager for "Inspector" for international and U.S. tours. "I was slightly confused as to why we were doing it."

But he quickly changed his mind. "As soon as we saw the designs, we knew it was going to be something different," Gillie says. The production, which has been revived many times and has won four Tony Awards, three Olivier Awards, and seven Drama Desk Awards. The play is now required reading in the British secondary education system, right along with Shakespeare.

Daldry and the creative team took what was considered an old chestnut, tore it apart, and reconstructed to reveal the stark message at its core. The play centers on a bourgeois family celebrating the engagement of a daughter whose marriage will raise the family a notch up on the social ladder. But things fall apart when the title character arrives with disturbing questions about a tragic death. The inspector draws the family members out of their refined world, and the set reflects the characters' psychological journey. Inside the pristine house, all is cozy and warm. Outside, a hard rain falls. Elements of film noir brush against the genteel drawing room theatrics, and the expressionistic set mirrors the disintegration of the family.

The production - and its ominously named title character Inspector Goole - sheds light on the hypocrisy of the middle class and its self-serving notion of philanthropy. When this version was first produced in the 1990s, Daldry was concerned about political attacks against single mothers and state support for them in Britain. There is a plot twist in the play that concerns the plight of an unwed mother.

Gillie is struck by how timely the play remains nearly a quarter of a century later. "Unless our world suddenly changes into a wonderful place, this is always going to be a relevant play," he says. "When we first remounted it a couple of years ago, the refugee crisis was starting in a major way in Europe. Shortly after that, your current president was elected. Our country voted to leave the European Union. The world turned crazy. It seems every time we remount it, something relevant is happening."

The play forces the characters to reveal secrets, prompted by the ominous presence of the enigmatic inspector. "He turns that family's life upside down," says Liam Brennan, a seasoned veteran of the British stage who plays the title role. "He makes them examine their consciences."

The inspector is deliberately a looming figure, and it's never quite clear who he is. "I love the mystery," Brennan says. "I love the fact that the people are debating who the inspector is."

The inspector's final words are haunting, warning that humanity will learn its lesson "in fire and blood and anguish." Since the play is set in 1912, Priestley was making an allusion to World War I, but the words can be interpreted differently for each generation. And Brennan is adamant that he deliver those lines in a matter of fact manner, rather than speak down to the audience.

And the production doesn't force feed a message either. The set, in some ways, tells the story. The urban wasteland is cold and dreary, and the constant rain could be a harbinger of the effects of global warming, even though that was not on the minds of the creators back in 1995. While there was a time when many wrote off Priestley as a tweedy traditionalist, Daldry and his colleagues discovered that he really was a social progressive with forward-thinking ideas.

"If there is a fundamental message to the piece, it is about tolerance and understanding," Brennan says. "It is about not condemning people for having very little and for having to do whatever is necessary to survive. There is no harm in being reminded of that stuff. That should never go out of fashion."

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Written In 1945, 'An Inspector Calls' Continues To Spread A Message Of Tolerance Today

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When director Stephen Daldry's dazzling production of "An Inspector Calls" first played Boston's Colonial Theatre in 1995, the British wunderkind (who went on to direct "Billy Elliot" and the Netflix series "The Crown") saw the play as a wake-up call for compassion during troubled times.

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Charles Dickens: ‘A Christmas Carol’ Analysis

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