Set in wartime Estonia, this was the last novel by Peter Vansittart, one of the greatest historical novelists of the 20th century. Erich's odyssey begins when his Estonian childhood is ended by the outbreak of World War II. He arrives in 1945 Paris, where his life seems full of promise. But a love affair drives him to England to work for the Estonian government-in-exile. His imagined island of monarchs, Churchill, and gentlemen evaporates into one of scornful youth, insular adults, and an underground of spies, political crooks, and fanatics. Sojourns in Europe further underline that war and corruption are not extinct and that, in his own life, the most profound shocks are those of friendship and love. Beneath the drift towards a united Europe, Erich realizes that treaties do not always end war, that solemn rites cannot guarantee love, and that the inevitable can fail to happen.
Bringing together Sigmund Freud, Osip Mandelstam, Lloyd George, Bertrand Russell, Isaac Rosenberg, Sigfried Sassoon, Vera Brittain -voices famous and unknown - Peter Vansittart takes us through the course of the Great War, juxtaposing letters from the trenches with music-hall songs, and the words of poets and politicians. Linking the public and the personal, the history with the myth, his rich and unorthodox anthology forms a moving image of everything that went into the War, and culminated in its 'scalding waste of spirit'. 'A historical echo chamber, agog with eye-witnesses, newspaper head-lines, memoirs, massacres and maniacs. He arranges his relic with moving irony. ' Sunday Times 'This valuable and entertaining anthology. . . does not set out to de-mythologize the war. . . But it goes a long way towards decosmeticizing it, showing the savage realities in which the myth had its roots. ' Observer
The fifties are often dismissed as a featureless interlude but here Peter Vansittart, distinguished novelist and anthologist, rediscovers their forgotten yet distinct flavour, recalling the funny and bizarre, the sad, the momentous, sometimes the atrocious." "Uninterested in fashion and fleeting reputations, he relishes the inescapable figures of Churchill and Lord Goddard, the generous but vain Shaw, the public-spirited Leonard Woolf. He sees Donald Wolfit sneezing, Alec Guinness nodding, John Masefield surviving." "He teaches at a school to the left of A. S. Neill and Bertrand Russell, a breeding-ground of mirth and inconsequence. At the newly founded Institute of Contemporary Art he witnesses T. S. Eliot being rebuked in person for anti-Semitism and Colin Wilson lambasting gentility; and, elsewhere, Elias Canetti talking nonsense to a waitress. In Pooterish style, he advises a fat stranger (J. B. Priestley) to try his hand at writing, and tells a pleasant woman that C. P. Snow is no good, without realizing they are engaged. He gets tipped half a crown by Randolph Churchill, admires Camus, Pasternak and Isaiah Berlin, meets Arnold Toynbee and A. J. Ayer, and is grateful to Evelyn Waugh. But all these take their place alongside coffee-bar grotesques, a painted tramp on Hampstead Heath, everyday commonplaces of London life, and living survivors from a forgotten age." "Pinpointing the decade's characteristic mixture of optimism and nostalgia, he also offers a unique perception of its literary and artistic landscape."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Focuses on one of the most momentous years in the history of Britain. In A.D. 367 the order and stability of the Roman Empire was threatened by a barbarian invasion. For the narrator, Drusus, the events of 367 and their aftermath determined not only
This is a description of England by the novelist Peter Vansittart, beginning with the mythical land of Albion, of Jack the Giant Killer, Arthur and Merlin. This idealized view of England informs his account of the more conventional heroes and villains, oppressions and advances in this island.;The author discusses English character traits, and progresses to English personalities such as the British theologian Pelagius, William of Occam, Wycliffe, Wolsey and Elizabeth I. After an a panegyric on the Tudor chimney, a portrait of Shakespeare, and an evocation of that lost art, the masque, the book surveys the period of Merrie England, the Imperial Age and England at war.
There is no city more talked about, or written about, than London. Each district, each landmark has literary associations hardly separable from the stones themselves. Some of them are well known, even hackneyed. Here you can see suburbia through the eyes of P.G. Wodehouse, or blitzed ruins through those of Rose Macaulay, or Hampstead society through Ezra Pound's. Max Beerbohm can introduce you to the goat that used to live in Piccadilly, and Victor Hugo to Charles II's watchman, whose job was to crow like a cock. You can watch G.B. Shaw dance in Fitzroy Square, with a chorus line of policemen, and see G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc ride donkeys into the Ritz. Here you can see Dr Johnson perform a citizen's arrest, observe Marx extracting money from Engels, watch E.M. Forster help E. Nesbit set fire to models of surburban villas, and learn about Queen Victoria's liking for nudes.;This book is a delightful celebration of London in all its moods, of royal London, commercial London, criminal London, the crowds, the river, even the fog - all of them given immediacy and life by writers as diverse as Samuel Pepys and Martin Amis, Thackeray and V.S. Pritchett.
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