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This journey to the edge of Europe mixes history, travelogue and oral testimony to spellbinding and revelatory effect. Few countries have suffered more from the convulsions and bloodshed of twentieth-century Europe than those in the eastern Baltic. Small nations such as the Baltic States of Latvia and Estonia found themselves caught between the giants of Germany and Russia, on a route across which armies surged or retreated. Subjected to foreign domination and conquest since the Northern crusades in the twelfth century, these lands faced frequent devastation as Germans, Russians and Swedish colonisers asserted control of the territory, religion, government, culture and inhabitants. The Glass...
East Prussia is no longer on any map, though it was once a thriving land, famously military, deeply forested, artistically fertile, and the birthplace of Immanuel Kant. As the scene of Stalin’s ‘terrible revenge’ it came to embody the turbulence of the twentieth century, was carved up between Poland and the USSR after World War II – and passed abruptly into history. Embarking on a remarkable journey through landscape and memory, Max Egremont has woven the stories of ghosts and survivors into an evocative and deeply moving meditation on identity and the passing of time. ‘East Prussia’s successful evocation demands both the mind of a poet who can delineate the scale of human loss, ...
The life of Siegfried Sassoon has been recorded and interpreted in literature and film for over half a century. He is one of the great figures of the First World War, and Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer are still widely read, as are his poems, which did much to shape our present ideas about the Great War. Sassoon was a genuine hero, a brave young officer who also became the war's most famous opponent, risking imprisonment and even a death sentence by throwing his Military Cross into the Mersey. He was friend to Robert Graves, mentor to Wilfred Owen and much admired by Churchill. But Sassoon was more than the embodiment of a romantic ideal; he was in many sense...
2014 marks the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of what many believed would be the war to end all wars. And while the First World War 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 the hopes and disappointments of a generation of men. In Some Desperate Glory, 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 ...
The outstanding biography of the Conservative Prime Minister, who was also a brilliant and elusive figure. For this biography, Max Egremont had unrestricted access to the long correspondence with Lady Elcho, with whom Balfour had an intimate relationship for almost fifty years.
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A biography of one of the greatest churchillians, a crucial lynch-pin between Britain and France
'The most fully researched and fully revealing life of this particular Lord Chancellor that we are ever likely to get.' David Cannadine, London Review of BooksF.E. Smith was the most brilliant political personality of the Edwardian era: 'the cleverest man in the kingdom', said Beaverbrook. The youngest Lord Chancellor since Judge Jeffreys, he engaged in some of the most bitter political battles of the age: Ulster, trade union reform, the House of Lords. He emerges from this masterly biography as a massively compelling figure.'A triumph of scholarship, judgement, lucidity and art... Like its subject John Campbell's book is leisurely, feline, and very, very clever.' Roy Foster, Guardian'A model biography.' A.J.P. Taylor, Observer'A joy... 800 pages of trenchant and often vivid prose.' The Times
Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) developed a mastery of graphic art which quickly established her reputation in Germany, then further afield as her influence spread internationally after the First World War. Establishing herself in an art world dominated by men, Kollwitz developed a vision centred on women and the working class. 'Portrait of the Artist' looks at her work through the exploration of self-portraits and portraits of working women, her two great series concerned with social injustice: Ein Weberaufstand (A Weavers' Revolt, 1897) and Bauernkrieg (Peasants' War, 1908), the ever-present imagery of death, especially a mother's grief, and finally the theme of war and remembrance after her younger son, Peter, had been killed at the beginning of the First World War. The exhibition is drawn from the collection of the British Museum and is complemented by a small number of loans from a private owner and The Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham.