Alamein to Zem Zem: Keith Douglas
A classic war book by one of the finest poets of the Second World War.
Keith Douglas was posted to Palestine in 1941 with a cavalry regiment. When fighting broke out at El Alamein in 1942, he was instructed to stay behind as a staff officer. But he wanted to fight, and so, completely disobeying orders, he drove a truck to the site of the battle and participated as a tank commander.
Alamein to Zem Zem is a vivid and unforgettable description of his experiences on the desert battlefield, seen through the eyes of a poet-soldier.
'Highly charged, violent descriptive prose … conveys the humour, the pathos and the literal beauty of that dead world of tanks, sand, scrub and human corpses … Comparable in descriptive power and intelligence to the books of Remarque, Sassoon and Blunden which spoke in similar terms of 1914-1918.' Spectator More
The Good Ship Venus: John de St. Jorre
The story of Maurice Girodias and the Olympia Press is one of the most bizarre and flamboyant in publishing history. At a time when dirty books (and great ones) were ... More
Report on Juvenile Delinquency: Mass Observation
Mass Observation was founded by Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings in 1937. Its purpose was to create 'an anthropology of ourselves' in other words, to study the everyday ... More
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In Humphrey Carpenter's own words, 'This is the story of the longest-ever literary party, which went on in Montparnasse, on the Left Bank, throughout the 1920s.''This book', to continue to ... More
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Here lies Lord Berners/One of life’s learners,Thanks be to the Lord/He was never bored.So reads the epitaph on the gravestone of Lord Berners. In its witty way, it hints at ... More
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In one of his Independent pieces Miles Kington once referred to a volume of Edward Lear's limericks translated into French. Not an easy task, you might think, and in translating ... More
Tolstoy's Letters Vol. 1: 1828-1879: selected, edited and translated by R. F. Christian
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