First edition. A brilliant portrait of the friendship, opinions and activities of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and George Wyndham. Includes a bibliography, illustrated and indexed. Clipped corner of jacket. 320 pages. cloth, dust jacket.. small 8vo..

The cousins: The friendship, opinions and activities of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and George Wyndham

Biographies & Memoirs

Egremont,Max

Community & Culture

Collins

One of the "Daily Telegraph" Books of the Year in 1989, this is a novel of love, hatred and betrayal in the upper echelons of British society. Three men are affected by the history and atmosphere of a country house in the north of England, where the owner's late wife had endured harsh realities.

Painted Lives

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Penguin Putnam~trade

Major General Sir Edward Louis Spears (1886-1974) lived under two flags: those of France and Great Britain. Brought up in France, he became an outstanding liaison officer (wounded four times) between the French and British forces during the First World War, dealing with Clemenceau, Petain and Lloyd George. But it was his meeting with Winston Churchill in 1916 that led to one of the closest friendships of his life. Called 'Winston's spy' by his enemies, he worked with Churchill between the wars as a member of parliament and was sent by the Prime Minister in June 1940 as his representative to the doomed French government, escaping with Charles de Gaulle to raise the standard of Fighting France in London. Then, after the disastrous Dakar expedition and Anglo-French discord in the Middle East, the relationship between Spears and de Gaulle turned from admiring intimacy to bitter dislike. Making full use of Spears's letter, diaries and papers, this biography provides a unique commentary on the turbulence of Britain's relations with France, as well as revealing the reactions of a consummate artist to the great personalities and events of his time.

Under Two Flags: The Life of General Sir Edward Spears

Leaders & Notable People

Weidenfeld Nicolson Ltd

Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886  in Kent, and began writing verses as a boy. While a brave young officer,  he confronted the terrible realities of the First World War on the battlefield, in verse, and, finally, by announcing his opposition to the war in 1917, showing that physical courage could exist alongside humanity and sensibility.In 1918, Sassoon found himself one of the most famous young writers of the time, a mentor to Wilfred Owen, and admired by Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence. He joined the Labour Party, became literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald, and began close friendships with Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster, while trying to adapt his poetry to peacetime. Then Sassoon fell in love with the artistocratic aesthete Stephen Tennant, who led him into his group of  Bright Young Things who inspired the early novels of Evelyn Waugh. At the demise of his passionate and fraught relationship with Tennant, Sassoon suddenly married the beautiful Hester Gatty in 1933 and retreated to a quiet country life until their eventual estrangement and Sassoon's subsequent conversion to Catholicism.From his famous war poems to  the gentler vision of his prose, Sassoon wrote masterfully of war and lost idylls, and this work and its complex author are brilliantly illuminated in Max Egremont's definitive biography.

Siegfried Sassoon : A Biography

Historical

Picador

Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia

Dust jacket worn, owner's inscription, page edges tanned. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

History

Picador USA

Until the end of World War II, East Prussia was the German empire's farthest eastern redoubt, a thriving and beautiful land on the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea. Now it lives only in history and in myth. Since 1945, the territory has been divided between Poland and Russia, stretching from the border between Russia and Lithuania in the east and south, and through Poland in the west. In Forgotten Land, Max Egremont offers a vivid account of this region and its people through the stories of individuals who were intimately involved in and transformed by its tumultuous history, as well as accounts of his own travels and interviews he conducted along the way.
Forgotten Land is a story of historical identity and character, told through intimate portraits of people and places. It is a unique examination of the layers of history, of the changing perceptions and myths of homeland, of virtue and of wickedness, and of how a place can still overwhelm those who left it years before.

Europe

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

About the Author\nMax Egremont was born in 1948 and studied modern history at Oxford University. He is the author of several novels and works of history and biography, including Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia, Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew, and an acclaimed biography of Siegfried Sassoon.\nMax Egremont, author of Some Desperate Glory, tells stories from the "Glass Wall" between Europe and Asia.\nFew countries have suffered more from the convulsions and bloodshed of twentieth-century Europe than those in the eastern Baltic region. Caught between the giants of Germany and Russia, on a route across which armies surged or retreated, small nations like Latvia and Estonia were for centuries the subjects of conquests and domination as foreign colonizers claimed control of the territory and its inhabitants, along with their religion, government, and culture.\nThe Glass Wall features an extraordinary cast of characters―contemporary and historical, foreign and indigenous―who have lived and fought in the Baltic, western Europe’s easternmost stronghold. Too often the destiny of this region has seemed to be to serve as the front line in other people’s wars. By telling the stories of warriors and victims, of philosophers and barons, of poets and artists, of rebels and emperors, and of others who lived through years of turmoil and violence, Max Egremont sets forth a brilliant account of a long-overlooked region, on a frontier whose limits may still be in doubt.

The Glass Wall: Lives on the Baltic Frontier

Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 in Kent, and began writing verses as a boy. While a brave young officer, he confronted the terrible realities of the First World War on the battlefield, in verse, and, finally, by announcing his opposition to the war in 1917, showing that physical courage could exist alongside humanity and sensibility.
In 1918, Sassoon found himself one of the most famous young writers of the time, a mentor to Wilfred Owen, and admired by Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence. He joined the Labour Party, became literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald, and began close friendships with Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster, while trying to adapt his poetry to peacetime. Then Sassoon fell in love with the artistocratic aesthete Stephen Tennant, who led him into his group of Bright Young Things who inspired the early novels of Evelyn Waugh. At the demise of his passionate and fraught relationship with Tennant, Sassoon suddenly married the beautiful Hester Gatty in 1933 and retreated to a quiet country life until their eventual estrangement and Sassoon's subsequent conversion to Catholicism.
From his famous war poems to the gentler vision of his prose, Sassoon wrote masterfully of war and lost idylls, and this work and its complex author are brilliantly illuminated in Max Egremont's definitive biography.

Siegfried Sassoon: A Life

Arts & Literature

The story of World War I, through the lives and words of its poets
The hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of what many believed would be the war to end all wars is in 2014. And while World War I devastated Europe, it inspired profound poetry―words in which the atmosphere and landscape of battle are evoked perhaps more vividly than anywhere else. The poets―many of whom were killed―show not only the war's tragedy but also the hopes and disappointments of a generation of men. In Some Desperate Glory, the historian and biographer Max Egremont gives us a transfiguring look at the life and work of this assemblage of poets. Wilfred Owen with his flaring genius; the intense, compassionate Siegfried Sassoon; the composer Ivor Gurney; Robert Graves, who would later spurn his war poems; the nature-loving Edward Thomas; the glamorous Fabian Socialist Rupert Brooke; and the shell-shocked Robert Nichols―all fought in the war, and their poetry is a bold act of creativity in the face of unprecedented destruction. Some Desperate Glory includes a chronological anthology of the poets' works, telling the story of the war not only through the lives of these writers but also through their art. This unique volume unites the poetry and the history of the war―so often treated separately―granting readers the pride, strife, and sorrow of the individual soldier's experience coupled with a panoramic view of the war's toll on an entire nation.

Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew

Poetry

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Books by Egremont,Max

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The cousins: The friendship, opinions and activities of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and George Wyndham

Painted Lives

Under Two Flags: The Life of General Sir Edward Spears

Siegfried Sassoon : A Biography

Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia

Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia

The Glass Wall: Lives on the Baltic Frontier

Siegfried Sassoon: A Life

Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew

Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia