This is a version of my Jonathan Cooper Memorial Lecture at the Mansfield College, Oxford, May 2026. The lecture was supported by the Sigrid Rausing Trust and organized by Helen Mountfield (Principal of the Mansfield College), Matt Cook (the Jonathan Cooper Chair of the History of Sexuality), and Asima Qayyum (Executive Assistant to the Principal). I never met Jonathan Cooper, but it turns out that we shared some good friends, who praise his enthusiasm, kindness, sense of

On 24 April 1941, 21-year-old Frank Joseph Gill was in the port of Piraeus, unimaginably far from his home in Liverpool, England. His sweat-stained uniform showed that he was a Lance-Corporal in the Royal Engineers. He was part of a band of servicemen from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand who had been ordered to evacuate from Greece, in anticipation of the imminent arrival of German troops. Along with hundreds of civilians and other servicemen, he boarded the yacht SS Hella

Ishiuchi Miyako, ‘ ひろしま/hiroshima ’, #71, 2007. ‘The photograph gives off mixed signals. Stop this [the violence], it urges. But it...

(This is the spoken version of the Alan Graham Memorial Lecture, that I gave at the conference ‘We The People’, Irish Association for American Studies, Trinity College Dublin, 25 April 2025. It is not the ‘final’ version, since I will continue to work on it, but gives a taste of my ideas.) ‘We the People’. The preamble to the Constitution of the United States (1789) declares that ‘We the People of the United States… do ordain and establish this Constitution’. In the Frenc

On the 7 July 1916, Arthur Hubbard painfully set pen to paper in an attempt to explain to his mother why he was no longer in France. He...

William Manchester was a scared young American, flung down on the island of Okinawa during the Second World War and expected to act with...

On the 29 June 1864, a military surgeon in the 21st Kentucky Infantry wrote to his wife. ‘It has been almost one continued stream of...

We are never told her name. None of the soldiers encircling her would have been interested in such niceties. The only relevant...

God, the source of natural law is dead: long live international law, with its hallowed spectre, human rights. State-sponsored terror,...

Fear, grief, sorrow: these are the overriding emotions of war. For men, women, and children confined to the home front between 1914 and...

The three sites of cruelty I will explore are (firstly) hierarchies of sentience, (secondly) wartime wounding, and (thirdly) sexual...

In 1975, Dennis Coates published a short book of poetry inspired by his time at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy. One poem –...

Just two months after the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington DC, Fox TV broadcast the first of their series ‘24’. The main...

Sexual violence and abuse are ingrained into military cultures. Armed conflict not only radically lowers the threshold at which...

In this blog, I reflect on the devastating conclusions of a report by the Defense Committee (25 July 2021) entitled ‘Protecting Those Who...