This book explores the ways in which Latin American poets, novelists, journalists, public intellectuals, and a vast number of unknown soldier-memorialists produced aesthetic and political discourses o
A vivid and powerful diary of life in the trenchesThe horrors of war in the trenches are brought to life with a rare immediacy and power through the diary of soldier and artist Len Smith. Enduring bat
Bestselling author Charlie Connelly returns with a First World War memoir of his great uncle, Edward Connelly, who was an ordinary boy sent to fight in a war the likes of which the world had never see
The book describes the development of the Swedish Army during the Great Northern War, 1700-1721, when Sweden fought against a coalition of Russia, Denmark-Norway and Poland-Saxony. For parts of the Wa
More than twenty years after the classic The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard returns to fiction with a novel that in the words of Ann Patchett "is brilliant and dazzling..."The Great Fire is an extraordinary love story set in the immediate aftermath of the great conflagration of the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His counterpart, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself. In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia’s coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim th
I have always been a soldier. I have known no other life. So begins Alexander’s extraordinary confession on the eve of his greatest crisis of leadership. By turns heroic and calculating, compassionate
In 1711 Peter the Great, the Tsar of Russia, led a large army of veterans from Poltava and his other Great Northern War victories into the Balkans. He aimed to humble the Ottomans in the same way he h
George “Brownie” Browne was a twenty-three-year-old civil engineer in Waterbury, Connecticut, when the United States entered the Great War in 1917. He enlisted almost immediately and serv
Imagine dodging bullets as you rush to help a wounded soldier on a battlefield. Or hiding secret messages in your skirt and sneaking across enemy lines. Women did these things and more during the Amer
Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Daly was a renowned soldier and one of the most influential figures in Australia's military history. As Chief of the General Staff during the Vietnam War, he oversaw a significant re-organisation of the Army as he fought a war under political and resource restrictions. In this unique biography, Jeffrey Grey shows how Daly prepared himself for the challenges of command in a time of great political upheaval. A Soldier's Soldier examines Daly's career from his entry to Duntroon in the early 1930s until his retirement forty years later, covering the key issues in the development of the Australian Army along the way. Drawing on extensive interview transcripts, the book provides a compelling portrait of Sir Thomas Daly and his distinguished career.
'What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?'The First World War produced an extraordinary flowering of poetic talent, from poets whose words commemorate the conflict as enduringly as monuments in stone. Their poems have come to express the feelings of a nation about the horrors and aftermath of war. This new anthology provides a definitive record of the achievements of the Great War poets. As well as offering generous selections from the celebrated soldier-poets, including Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and Ivor Gurney, it also incorporates less well-known writing by civilian and women poets. Music hall and trench songs provide a further lyrical perspective on the War. The work of each poet is prefaced with a biographical account that sets the poems in their historical context. In addition, Tim Kendall's introduction charts the history of the war poets' reception and challenges prevailing myths about their progress from idealism to bitterness.
The image of the innocent British soldier (or “Tommy”) setting off with a spring in his step in 1914 to fight the “Great War” would not last long.Indeed that initial euphoria would soon give way to a
A pattern has been given to the history of the events between 1914 and 1918 which is called the ‘Great War’. To Henri Desagneaux and to thousands of others, there was no pattern to be seen from the tr
In the first story of this absorbing collection, Margarita—sixteen and married to a soldier who has gone off to fight in the first great war—meets and falls in love with Federico García Lorca. He call
