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Laddar... The Fateful Year: England 1914av Mark Bostridge
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The Fateful Year by Mark Bostridge is the story of England in 1914. War with Germany, so often imagined and predicted, finally broke out when people were least prepared for it. Here, among a crowded cast of unforgettable characters, are suffragettes, armed with axes, destroying works of art, schoolchildren going on strike in support of their teachers, and celebrity aviators thrilling spectators by looping the loop. A theatrical diva prepares to shock her audience, while an English poet in the making sets out on a midsummer railway journey that will result in the creation of a poem that remains loved and widely known to this day. With the coming of war, England is beset by rumour and foreboding. There is hysteria about German spies, fears of invasion, while patriotic women hand out white feathers to men who have failed to rush to their country's defence. In the book's final pages, a bomb falls from the air onto British soil for the first time, and people live in expectation of air raids. As 1914 fades out, England is preparing itself for the prospect of a war of long duration. Mark Bostridge won the Gladstone Memorial Prize at Oxford University. His first book Vera Brittain: A Life was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Prize, the NCR NonFiction Award, and the Fawcett Prize. His books also include the bestselling Letters from a Lost Generation; Lives for Sale, a collection of biographers' tales; Because You Died, a selection of Vera Brittain's First World War poetry and prose; and Florence Nightingale: The Woman and her Legend, which was named as a Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2008 and awarded the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography. The Fateful Year was shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History 2015. Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
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Google Books — Laddar... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)940.342History and Geography Europe Europe World War I 1914-1918 Europe EnglandKlassifikation enligt LCBetygMedelbetyg:
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the book opens with England obsessing over the loss of a single life, the murder of a small boy found dead in a railway carriage. A terrible tragedy, but somehow an unsatisfying introduction but I soon get into the stride of it. The author has collected material from diaries, newspapers and a wide range of official sources. His treatment of the Suffragette Movement, was detailed and gripping I was intrigued by the vivid account of the German navy’s shelling of Scarborough, Whitby and Hartlepool and fascinated by his depiction of Prime Minister Asquith's "relationship" with Venita Stanley. Asquith’s confiding to her in his often more than daily correspondence, seems in today's security-stifled landscape more than a little worrying. On the Irish Question, I was left wanting more, but the main player here is England. There is a good chapter on Edward Thomas whose own travels and writing at this time was likewise concerned with recording a nation in transition as an impending war ushered-in a parallel awful universe. Thomas rightly anticipated and feared these changes though his is a highly personalised, perhaps even self-centered observation. And while Mark Bostridge's exploration ranges over more of the quotidian aspects of the lives of men and women of that time he shares much of Thomas's concerns. The Fateful Year England 1914 is a very good read, demonstrating that within the contexulisation of the ordinary that the fogs of complexity are dispersed. Bostrtidge clears these clouds of time and social memory helping this reader to a much better understanding of the social conditions when exactly 100 years ago England was going to war. Tomorrow I will be listening to his lecture on his book in Keswick, looking forward to that. ( )