The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War

Parker, Peter

Harpercollins

This moving and timely book explores the way the First World War has been thought about and commemorated, and how it has affected its own, and later, generations.
On 11 November 1920, huge crowds lined the streets of London for the funeral of the Unknown Warrior. As the coffin was drawn on a gun carriage from the Cenotaph to Westminster Abbey, the King and Ministers of State followed silently behind. The modern world had tilted on its axis, but it had been saved. Armistice Day was born, the acknowledgement of the great sacrifice made by a whole generation of British men and women.
Now, almost a century later, Harry Patch, the last British veteran who saw active service, has died. Our final link with the First World War is broken.
Harry Patch was born in 1898 and was conscripted in 1916. He served with a Lewis gun team at the Battle of Passchendaele and in September 1917 was wounded by a shell that killed three of his comrades. After the war, Patch returned to Somerset to work as a plumber, a job he continued to do until his retirement.
The First World War was fought not by a professional army but by ordinary civilians like Patch, who epitomised Edwardian Britain and the sense, now lost, of what Britain stood for and why it was worth fighting for. ‘The Last Veteran’ tells Patch's story, and explores the meaning of the war to those who fought in it and the generations that have followed. Peter Parker's illuminating and timely book is a moving tribute to a remarkable generation.

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Fourth Estate

Long unavailable, this acclaimed book traces the history of an ideal and examines its effect on the lives of those caught up in the First World War. Rupert Brooke's apparent enthusiasm for the War in 1914 was echoed throughout England, particularly by young men who had been educated in a gentlemanly tradition of patriotism, chivalry and sportsmanship at their public schools. These codes had also trickled down through society thanks to the school stories that appeared in popular boys' magazines, and to the missions and boys' clubs run by the schools and universities in the poorer parts of the country.Â Drawing upon a wealth of material, Peter Parker's fascinating book traces the growth and dissemination ofÂ what Wilfred Owen dismissed as â€˜the old lie' in his poem Dulce Et Decorum Est. It also explores the wide variety of responses to the war - from celebration to denigration, from patriotic acquiescence to bitter rebellion - as they were reflected in the poetry, plays and prose of the period.Â The Old Lie unearths some truly bizarre notions about education and warfare and illuminatingly re-examines the literature of the First World War by placing it in its historical and social perspective. &gt;

Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos

History

Europe

St Martins Pr

Ackerley: A life of J.R. Ackerley

Constable

Ackerley

Arts & Literature

This autobiography of Sir Peter Parker gives the full story of his time as Chairman of British Rail, from the political debacle of his refused 1967 appointment, to cliff-hanging nights in his fight with penny-pinching governments and intransigent unions to win a more efficient but socially committed railway service. His broad experience gave him a unique insight into the problems of British industry and its relationship with society. He is passionate about William Blake, shrewd about Mrs Thatcher and privatization and eloquent in his belief that management ought to be taken seriously but also ought to be good fun. He also writes about the National Theatre, founding the Booker Prize and the Barons of Industry.

For Starters: The Memoirs of Peter Parker

Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group)

The authors take a scalpel to South Africa's system of criminal justice during the Apartheid era. They focus on the case of the Sharpeville Six to analyse how criminal justice was used to make convictions easy to secure. Analysing the technicalities of the criminal law, as well as the quality of evidence and judicial reasoning in the case against the Six, Parker and Mokhesi-Parker also convey vividly through letters from death row, the sense these people made of their impending executions and how an international campaign to save their lives succeeded with only 18 hours to spare.

In the Shadow of Sharpeville: Apartheid and Criminal Justice

Mokhesi-Parker, Joyce

Africa

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

Housman Country: Into the Heart of England

Why is it that for many people 'England' has always meant an unspoilt rural landscape rather than the ever-changing urban world in which most English people live? What was the 'England' for which people fought in two world wars? What is about the English that makes them constantly hanker for a vanished past, so that nostalgia has become a national characteristic?
In March 1896 a small volume of sixty-three poems was published by the small British firm of Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner &amp; Co. Ltd in an edition of 500 copies, priced at half-a-crown each. The author was not a professional poet, but a thirty-seven-year-old professor of Latin at University College, London called Alfred Edward Housman who had been obliged to pay £30 towards the cost of publication. Although slow to sell at first,A Shropshire Ladwent on to become one of the most popular books of poetry ever published and has never been out of print. As well as being a publishing phenomenon, the book has had an influence on English culture and notions of what 'England' means, both in England itself and abroad, out of all proportion to its apparent scope.
 Housman Countrywill not only look at howA Shropshire Ladcame to be written and became a publishing and cultural phenomenon, but will use the poems as a prism through which to examine England and Englishness. The book contains a full transcript of A Shropshire lad itself, also making it a superb present.

ABACUS +

Solar Neutrinos: The First Thirty Years

Science & Math

Ulrich, Roger

Davis, Jr.

Physics

CRC-Press

The English writer J. R. Ackerley (1896-1967) is best known today as the author of "My Dog Tulip", "My Father and Myself", and "We Think the World of You", books which have become classics of their kind and which have recently been reissued in the United States to widespread acclaim. Ackerley is a twentieth-century exemplar of a time-honored English tradition: the odd individualist whose steadfast adherence to his peculiar way of seeing eventually becomes representative. His books are models of lucid, often comic self-exploration, for Ackerley's primary concern as a writer was to attempt to understand his own nature. A complex, contradictory, and combative character, a fierce champion of personal freedom, Ackerley was a promiscuous homosexual who also spent much of his life in the often frustrated pursuit of the "Ideal Friend". In many ways, his most successful relationship was with his German Shepherd, Queenie, the heroin of "My Dog Tulip". Ackerley served as literary editor of 'The Listener', one of England's leading journals, from 1935 to 1959 and is renowned for his achievements as an editor. Among his friends were the leading writers of his time, especially E. M. Forster, but also Clive Bell, Kenneth Clark, Wyndham Lewis, Herbert Read, Siegfried Sassoon, Stephen Spender, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Peter parker's engaging, frank, and moving narrative of Ackerley's public and private life is an engrossing and provocative portrait of a singular man who is coming to be appreciated as a major figure in modern English letters.

Ackerley: The Life of J.R. Ackerley

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

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