Despite all the talk of protectionism in both rich and poor countries there has probably never been a time when the idea of economic autarchy has been less popular than the 1980s. The so-called “New Protectionism” of the 1980s has several historically novel dimensions but far from being “New” the essential idea is the very ancient one of corporations encouraged by the governments of the countries in which they are domiciled attempting to gain competitive advantages over those from other countries by fair means and by foul. The traditional charges of low cost producers flooding markets with cheap, and sometimes dangerously inferior goods, the use by foreign governments of unfair incentives to exporters (export subsidies), and the imposition of quantitative import restrictions by importing countries, are flying around global commerce to a degree that has some very sober politicians, policy makers and economists publicly worried for the very future of the global system and, by implication, world security. To put it bluntly, the ideologues of “free trade” or “liberalization” as it is increasingly being labelled, argue that the “New Protectionism” if it is permitted to spread will inevitably lead to a “New Depression,” and this may well lead to global anarchy not only in commerce but also in the politico-military relations between nations.

A Son at the Front is the story of a war fought, as Edith Wharton said, “from the rear,” a war in which the art of portrait painting becomes a deadly weapon. In John Campton's World War I Paris, where the fashionable portrait painter wields his paintings in a behind the lines battle to gain, as he says, “possession” of his grown son, Wharton probes the sexual politics underlying the development of modernist aesthetics by writing a new kind of war novel. The novel invokes and then questions a central trope of the fiction and poetry that, until recently, has been identified as The Literature of the Great War.