World War I (1914-1918)
The more you read about the First World War, the more you realize that the centuries meet there. The career of nation-states, the legacies of imperialism, the entanglement of colonialism, the pace of technological development, the gamemanship of ways of doing battle dating back to the Roman Empire, and the irresistable rise of 20th Century powers all collide in a four-year war.
Here I stock a mix of traditional histories, fiction, and other ways of telling the story that echoes into our present day.
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man: The Memoirs of George Sherston
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man: The Memoirs of George Sherston
The first volume in Siegfried Sassoon's beloved trilogy, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, with a new introduction by celebrated historian Paul Fussell
A highly decorated English soldier and an acclaimed poet and novelist, Siegfried Sassoon won fame for his trilogy of fictionalized autobiographies that wonderfully capture the vanishing idylls of Edwardian England and the brutal realities of war.
In this first novel of the semiautobiographical George Sherston trilogy, Sassoon wonderfully captures the vanishing idylls of the Edwardian English countryside. Never out of print since its original publication in 1928, when it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Sassoon's reminiscences about childhood and the beginning of World War I are channeled through young George Sherston, whose life of local cricket tournaments and fox-hunts falls apart as war approaches and he joins up to fight. Sassoon's first novel, though rife with comic characters and a jaunty sense of storytelling, presents his own loss of innocence and the destruction of the country he knew and loved.
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