David Ellison
speaker
414 appearances
6 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2018
last heard 16 Jun
David Ellison’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
his violin, which he will use as a kind of transcribing instrument, and imagines this kind of quasi-scholarly activity in which he will disappear into the north, fleeing from the tentacles of the army and very slowly restoring himself through his interest and through his love of music.
So they are Kelly, who is a brute, sadistic corporal who initially appears as a witness of these atrocities that occurred.
No, no, although the writing is on the wall, I think.
Okay.
And his fellow, Kelly is paired with Medina, a fellow soldier, a Spanish soldier in this case, and they are given the job of finding Lacroix and killing him.
And this is an agreement that has been arranged previously
by the English and the Spanish as a way of compensating them for this atrocity that occurred in the village of Morales.
It is a compelling cat and mouse story because you've got someone who's traumatized.
And as I mentioned before, that is a familiar tale.
So we know at some point the source of the trauma will be revealed.
And that source of the trauma is also, in this case, a crime that demands some kind of punishment.
and the punishment is to be delivered at the hands of these two soldiers, one of whom is, as I mentioned, a kind of sadistic brute, and the other is a much gentler fellow, searching, interested in the world.
Quite cosmopolitan in comparison.
And so they're a kind of...
an uncomfortable pairing in many respects.
The difficulty for me, and this was initially kind of stymied my best efforts to like the novel, is that I found that slightly unconvincing in that war crimes in the Peninsular War
are certainly known to us.
They're known to us through Goya, right?
Goya does this incredible series of etchings called The Disasters of War, which famously set the template for the kind of atrocities that soldiers are capable of wreaking upon a civilian population.
And in fact, well into the 20th and 21st century, that's still the template.
Showing 301–320 of 414 · page 16 of 21
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