The Last Englishmen

Author: Deborah Baker
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555979947
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 442

Book Description
A sumptuous biographical saga, both intimate and epic, about the waning of the British Empire in India John Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalaya. Michael Spender was the first to draw a detailed map of the North Face of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers—W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender—achieved literary fame, they vied to be included on an expedition that would deliver Everest’s summit to an Englishman, a quest that had become a metaphor for Britain’s struggle to maintain power over India. To this rivalry was added another: in the summer of 1938 both men fell in love with a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine where each man’s wartime loyalties would lie. Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and on Everest itself, The Last Englishmen is also the story of a generation. The cast of this exhilarating drama includes Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and Communist spies, Die Hards and Indian nationalists, political rogues and police informers. Key among them is a highborn Bengali poet named Sudhin Datta, a melancholy soul torn, like many of his generation, between hatred of the British Empire and a deep love of European literature, whose life would be upended by the arrival of war on his Calcutta doorstep. Dense with romance and intrigue, and of startling relevance for the great power games of our own day, Deborah Baker’s The Last Englishmen is an engrossing story that traces the end of empire and the stirring of a new world order.

The Last Englishman

Author: Keith Foskett
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781916487901
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
A 2,640-mile hiking adventure on the Pacific Crest Trail. Short-listed for Outdoor Book of the Year by The Great Outdoors magazine. New edition includes bonus chapter - What Happened to Rockets?

The Last Englishman

Author: Alfred Daniel Wintle
Publisher: Michael Joseph
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description

The Last Englishman

Author: Roland Chambers
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
ISBN: 1567924174
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Book Description
Arthur Ransome, best known for the Swallows and Amazons series, led a double, and often tortured, life. Before his fame as an author, he was notorious for very different reasons: between 1917 and 1924, he was the Russian correspondent for the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian, and his sympathy for the Bolshevik regime gave him access to its leaders, politics, and plots. He was friends with Karl Radek, the Bolshevik's Chief of Propaganda, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the secret police. In this biography, Chambers explores the tensions Ransome felt between his allegiance to England's decencies and the egalitarian Bolshevik vision, between the Lake Country he loved and always considered home and the lure of the Russian steppes to which he repeatedly returned. What emerges is not only history, but also the story of an immensely troubled man not entirely at home in either culture or country.

The Fatal Englishman

Author: Sebastian Faulks
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307523608
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
In The Fatal Englishman, his first work of nonfiction, Sebastian Faulks explores the lives of three remarkable men. Each had the seeds of greatness; each was a beacon to his generation and left something of value behind; yet each one died tragically young. Christopher Wood, only twenty-nine when he killed himself, was a painter who lived most of his short life in the beau monde of 1920s Paris, where his charm, good looks, and the dissolute life that followed them sometimes frustrated his ambition and achievement as an artist. Richard Hillary was a WWII fighter pilot who wrote a classic account of his experiences, The Last Enemy, but died in a mysterious training accident while defying doctor’s orders to stay grounded after horrific burn injuries; he was twenty-three. Jeremy Wolfenden, hailed by his contemporaries as the brightest Englishman of his generation, rejected the call of academia to become a hack journalist in Cold War Moscow. A spy, alcoholic, and open homosexual at a time when such activity was still illegal, he died at the age of thirty-one, a victim of his own recklessness and of the peculiar pressures of his time. Through the lives of these doomed young men, Faulks paints an oblique portrait of English society as it changed in the twentieth century, from the Victorian era to the modern world.

The Englishman's Boy

Author: Guy Vanderhaeghe
Publisher: Emblem Editions
ISBN: 1551995700
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Book Description
The Englishman’s Boy brilliantly links together Hollywood in the 1920s with one of the bloodiest, most brutal events of the nineteenth-century Canadian West – the Cypress Hills Massacre. Vanderhaeghe’s rendering of the stark, dramatic beauty of the western landscape and of Hollywood in its most extravagant era – with its visionaries, celebrities, and dreamers – provides vivid background for scenes of action, adventure, and intrigue. Richly textured, evocative of time and place, this is an unforgettable novel about power, greed, and the pull of dreams that has at its centre the haunting story of a young drifter – “the Englishman’s boy” – whose fate, ultimately, is a tragic one.

The Englishman's Daughter

Author: Ben Macintyre
Publisher: Delta
ISBN: 0385336799
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
In the first terrifying days of World War I, four British soldiers found themselves trapped behind enemy lines on the western front. They were forced to hide in the tiny French village of Villeret, whose inhabitants made the courageous decision to shelter the fugitives until they could pass as Picard peasants. The Englishman’s Daughter is the never-before-told story of these extraordinary men, their protectors, and of the haunting love affair between Private Robert Digby and Claire Dessenne, the most beautiful woman in Villeret. Their passion would result in the birth of a child known as “The Englishman’s Daughter,” and in an act of unspeakable betrayal, a tragic legacy that would haunt the village for generations to come. Through the testimonies of the villagers and the last letters of the soldiers, acclaimed journalist Ben Macintyre has pieced together a harrowing account of how life was lived behind enemy lines during the Great War, and offers a compelling solution to a gripping mystery that reverberates to this day.

The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

Author: Richard Greene
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039365107X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 624

Book Description
A Finalist for the 2022 Edgar Award A Washington Post Best Nonfiction Book of the Year A vivid, deeply researched account of the tumultuous life of one of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists, the author of The End of the Affair. One of the most celebrated British writers of his generation, Graham Greene’s own story was as strange and compelling as those he told of Pinkie the Mobster, Harry Lime, or the Whisky Priest. A journalist and MI6 officer, Greene sought out the inner narratives of war and politics across the world; he witnessed the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Mau Mau Rebellion, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the guerrilla wars of Central America. His classic novels, including The Heart of the Matter and The Quiet American, are only pieces of a career that reads like a primer on the twentieth century itself. The Unquiet Englishman braids the narratives of Greene’s extraordinary life. It portrays a man who was traumatized as an adolescent and later suffered a mental illness that brought him to the point of suicide on several occasions; it tells the story of a restless traveler and unfailing advocate for human rights exploring troubled places around the world, a man who struggled to believe in God and yet found himself described as a great Catholic writer; it reveals a private life in which love almost always ended in ruin, alongside a larger story of politicians, battlefields, and spies. Above all, The Unquiet Englishman shows us a brilliant novelist mastering his craft. A work of wit, insight, and compassion, this new biography of Graham Greene, the first undertaken in a generation, responds to the many thousands of pages of letters that have recently come to light and to new memoirs by those who knew him best. It deals sensitively with questions of private life, sex, and mental illness, and sheds new light on one of the foremost modern writers.

An Englishman a la Campagne

Author: Michael Sadler
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743492404
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
The Parisien now wants to be a paysan, but it's easier said than done . . . How do you plant leeks in cement-hard French soil, impress Gallic neighbours with your non-existent gardening credentials and survive a seven-hour celebratory communion lunch (followed by dinner)? What skills are required to cope with suicidal French mice (souricide?), resist the advances of an attractive but desperate lady cheese-maker during an English lesson, buy wine from Mr Grump the grower, and -- last but not least -- stoop so low as to snap up the plastic trophy in the annual garden competition? AN ENGLISHMAN A LA CAMPAGNE is a wonderfully warm and witty follow-up to the author's account of his first year living in Paris. Now broadening his affectionate embrace to include the myriad facets of the French countryside, Sadler makes you laugh, makes you think, and makes you love the place . . . even Donges, which won first prize in his competition for the grottiest village in France.

Legionnaire

Author: Simon Murray
Publisher: Presidio Press
ISBN: 0307415813
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
“A pleasure to read and nearly impossible to put down.” –Army Times “Embodies an experience that many have enjoyed in fantasy–few in reality.” –The Washington Post The French Foreign Legion–mysterious, romantic, deadly–is filled with men of dubious character, and hardly the place for a proper Englishman just nineteen years of age. Yet in 1960, Simon Murray traveled alone to Paris, Marseilles, and ultimately Algeria to fulfill the toughest contract of his life: a five-year stint in the Legion. Along the way, he kept a diary. Legionnaire is a compelling, firsthand account of Murray’s experience with this legendary band of soldiers. This gripping journal offers stark evidence that the Legion’s reputation for pushing men to their breaking points and beyond is well deserved. In the fierce, sun-baked North African desert, strong men cracked under brutal officers, merciless training methods, and barbarous punishments. Yet Murray survived, even thrived. For he shared one trait with these hard men from all nations and backgrounds: a determination never to surrender. “The drama, excitement, and color of a good guts-and-glory thriller.” –Dr. Henry Kissinger