Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man

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According to Keynes, 'This special printing was an afterthought, made when the success of the ordinary edition was assured and the identity of the author known'. Messages start coming in of friends who have been killed, but these are abstract thoughts, like hearing about a natural disaster that happened two thousand miles away. The first two thirds of this book is devoted to fox-hunting, horse racing, cricket matches, reading, gazing longingly at young men he admired, and enjoying what would turn out to be the last few years of a naivety that England would never be able to reclaim.

This is the first of three volumes, the second and third of which focus more closely on Sassoon's wartime experiences. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The War Poems' by the same author is still in print, and still being studied by students of English literature, but if you really want to get inside the mind of a war poet, read this book. We have grown to love George and his friends, who are young, fearless, fun and have their whole lives ahead of them.In the years since its first appearance, it has regularly been a set text for British schoolchildren. Ultimately everything leads to the final two sections and his enlistment in the army as WWI looms unexpectedly from out of the quiet pastoral background in which he has been snuggly swaddled up to this point. An early love of Sassoon's poetry (trench warfare poetry is as good for gothic teenage tastes as Sylvia Plath) led me to finally read this book, the first in the Sherston trilogy, a fictionalised trio of biographies written by Sassoon between the two world wars.

We threw a few Mills' bombs at a German working-party who were putting up some wire and had no wish to do us any harm. Sassoon was an earnest, unimaginative, platitudinous versifier, cranking out cliches about the countryside and self-absorbed reflections on his own life, the kind of thing that Stella Gibbons pilloried in Cold Comfort Farm as Asterisked Great Thoughts.All of this Edwardian badinage only makes it the more painful when he sees his cosy world come crashing down with the outbreak of the First World War, a narrative intrusion that is carefully held off until near the end of the book. I can hear the creak of the saddle and the clop and clink of the hoofs as we cross the bridge over the brook by Dundell Farm; there is a light burning in the farmhouse window, and the evening star glitters above a broken drift of half-luminous cloud. Previously from the library of British politician and diplomat Duff Cooper whose large bookplate (designed by Rex Whistler, incorporating a bust of Cooper's wife, Lady Diana, as Artemis) is on the upper pastedown.

A limited edition, signed by Sassoon, was published later in 1928 and matching limited and signed volumes were issued alongside the publication of the two other volumes. He abandoned transport duties and went out on patrols whenever possible, desperate to kill as many Germans as he could, earning him the nickname ‘Mad Jack.

He is there to enjoy the ride, the jumping of fences, and the comradery of men intent on the same purpose. Features an attractive original cream dust jacket with cobalt blue text, protected by removable clear plastic overlay. While I was reading, I found some of this tedious ("not another description of horses jumping hedges"), but looking at the thing as a whole, I can appreciate the way it allowed Sassoon to describe many different characters and show rather than tell Sherston's slow maturing. On the other hand it can be seen as an indictment (knowing or otherwise) of the generally indolent and purposeless lives of the idle rich before an entire generation was nearly decimated. Quite clean interior with 296 untrimmed pages; and illustrated by William Nicholson with 7 black and white plates of which most have a rather frayed tissue guard, and further drawings in the text.