Reading into Words

This chapter considers World War 1 as a high point for reading as a way of understanding events, alongside Clark’s own role as a particularly dedicated reader of war-time use. Newspapers – often given a bad press in writing on WWI – were, for Clark, to be exploited as multi-genre spaces, offering a marked diversity of forms. Letters from the Front, diaries, advertising, accounts of war, politics, fashion, and cookery, often appeared across their pages. Clark’s reading deliberately spanned a social, political, and geographical spectrum, while revealing a process of attentive scrutiny, collection and annotation in a documentary excursus into a world in flux.