Kirjahaku

One of Britain’s best-known and most loved poets, Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) was killed at age 25 on one of the last days of the First World War, having acted heroically as soldier and officer despite his famous misgivings about the war's rationale and conduct. He left behind a body of poetry that sensitively captured the pity, rage, valor, and futility of the conflict.In this new biography Guy Cuthbertson provides a fresh account of Owen's life and formative influences: the lower-middle-class childhood that he tried to escape; the places he lived in, from Birkenhead to Bordeaux; his class anxieties and his religious doubts; his sexuality and friendships; his close relationship with his mother and his childlike personality. Cuthbertson chronicles a great poet's growth to poetic maturity, illuminates the social strata of the extraordinary Edwardian era, and adds rich context to how Owen's enduring verse can be understood.

What happened on the last day of the Great War? Each year since we have marked the end of the war with tributes and remembrance, solemnity and respect. But as Peace at Last reveals, the first Armistice Day in 1918 was entirely unprecedented and extraordinary. Upon hearing the news of the peace, crowds of people took to the streets, scaled statues, burnt effigies on bonfires and ran riot as joy and relief swept through the British population and the wider world. Drawing on news reports, literature, memoirs and letters, Cuthbertson brings to the fore the full strangeness of the day - its celebratory, wild atmosphere - and the experiences of ordinary people as well as soldiers and prominent figures like D. H. Lawrence, Robert Graves and David Lloyd George. Cuthbertson takes us from midnight to midnight - from when the Armistice was signed to the removing of black paint from streetlamps, flooding cities with light.Peace at Last is the compelling portrait of one of the most important days in history - an exciting and inspiring moment which has, until now, remained relatively unknown.

A vibrant account of the remarkable novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, tracing its life over the last century D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is one of the best-known and most resonant works of the twentieth century. Originally considered obscene and unpublishable in numerous countries, its scandalous story of class divide and the English countryside is infamous. But, since the 1920s, we have repeatedly re-created Lady Chatterley, from film and TV to music and tourism. Guy Cuthbertson tells the colourful story of the novel’s journey through the last hundred years. He examines how the book has been read, adapted, and reimagined across the globe, from the United States to Japan, and explores the 1960 “Chatterley trial”—a key moment in the struggle for freedom of expression. It might have been burnt and derided, laughed at and defaced, but Lawrence’s novel has crept into all walks of life. Whether the book, or its influence, be good or bad, we live in a world that Lady Chatterley’s Lover helped to create.