From the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Rupert Brooke, to the novels of Ford Madox Ford, Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway, the First World War has had an extraordinary influence on literature. How can experiences that were, for so many ‘beyond words’, be described and why do they still exert such fascination? Leading literary critic Jonathan Bate, Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, discusses the literature of World War One with James Runcie.