G.W.M. Reynolds’s View of Military Service

By Stephen Basdeo

A book of mine has just been through the final proofing stage and is now with the printers and, the coronavirus pandemic allowing, will be released on 30 June 2020.

A popular history book titled Heroes and Villains of the British Empire, I give a cultural history of how imperial ‘heroes’ were viewed in British popular culture.

Do excuse the seemingly uber-patriotic front cover—open the book and you’ll see that all is not as it appears. The figure on the front cover is not a soldier but actually a penny dreadful hero/rogue called Jack Harkaway and much of the book is taken up with an analysis of radicals’ thoughts on imperialism and their writings in popular fiction and poetry (besides, if by the very ‘imperialist’ cover I can ride the popularity of what some have called the recent wave of imperial nostalgia, earn some money, while…