Download or read book The Great Silence written by Juliet Nicolson and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This account of British life in the wake of World War I is “social history at its very best . . . insightful and utterly absorbing” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). As the euphoria of Armistice Day in 1918 quickly subsided, there was no denying the carnage that the Great War had left in its wake. Grief and shock overwhelmed the psyche of the British people—but from their despair, new life would slowly emerge. For veterans with faces demolished in the trenches, surgeon Harold Gillies brings hope with his miraculous skin-grafting procedure. Women win the vote, skirt hems leap, and Brits forget their troubles at packed dance halls. And two years later, the remains of a nameless combatant would be laid to rest in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Westminster Abbey, as “The Great Silence,” observed in memory of the countless dead, halted citizens in silent reverence. This history of two transformative years in the life of a nation features countless characters, from an aging butler to a pair of newlyweds, from the Prince of Wales to T. E. Lawrence, the real-life Lawrence of Arabia. The Great Silence depicts a nation fighting the forces that threaten to tear it apart and discovering the common bonds that hold it together. “A pearl of anecdotal history, The Great Silence is a satisfying companion to major studies of World War I and its aftermath . . . as Nicolson proceeds through the familiar stages of grief—denial, anger and acceptance—she gives you a deeper understanding of not only this brief period, but also how war’s sacrifices don’t end after the fighting stops.” —The Seattle Times “It may make you cry.” —The Boston Globe

Download or read book The Great Silence written by Juliet Nicolson and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2009-11-12 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peace at last, after Lloyd George declared it had been 'the war to end all wars', would surely bring relief and a renewed sense of optimism? But this assumption turned out to be deeply misplaced as people began to realise that the men they loved were never coming home. The Great Silence is the story of the pause between 1918 and 1920. A two-minute silence to celebrate those who died was underpinned by a more enduring silence born out of national grief. Those who had danced through settled Edwardian times, now faced a changed world. Some struggled to come to terms with the last four years, while others were anxious to move towards a new future. Change came to women, who were given the vote only five years after Emily Davidson had thrown herself on the ground at Ascot race course, to the poor, determined to tolerate their condition no longer, and to those permanently scarred, mentally and physically, by the conflict. The British Monarchy feared for its survival as monarchies around Europe collapsed and Eric Horne, one time butler to the gentry, found himself working in a way he considered unseemly for a servant of his calibre. Whether it was embraced or rejected, change had arrived as the impact of a tragic war was gradually absorbed. With her trademark focus on daily life, Juliet Nicolson evokes what England was like during this fascinating hinge in history.

Download or read book The Great Silence 1918 1920 written by Juliet Nicolson and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of life after the Great War: a turning point in history.

Download or read book The Great War in American and British Cinema 1918 1938 written by Ryan Copping and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book recounts the reception of selected films about the Great War released between 1918 and 1938 in the USA and Great Britain. It discusses the role that popular cinema played in forming and reflecting public opinion about the War and its political and cultural aftermath in both countries. Although the centenary has produced a wide number of studies on the memorialisation of the Great War in Britain and to a lesser degree the USA, none of them focused on audience reception in relation to the Anglo-American ‘circulatory system’ of Trans-Atlantic culture.

Download or read book Two Roads to War written by Robin Higham and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2012-06-15 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noted aviation historian Robin Higham has written this comparative study of the evolution of the French and British air arms from 1918 to 1940 to determine why the Armée de l’Air was defeated in June 1940 but the Royal Air Force was able to win the battle over Britain in September. After analyzing the structure, men, and matériel of the air arms, and the government and economic infrastructure of both countries, he concludes that the French force was dominated by the Armée de Terre, had no suitably powerful aero engines, and suffered from the chaos of French politics. In contrast, the independent RAF evolved into a sophisticated, scientifically based force, supported by consistent government practices. Higham’s thorough examination, however, finds the British not without error.

Download or read book Those Wild Wyndhams written by Claudia Renton and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The three dazzlingly beautiful, wildly rich Wyndham sisters, part of the four hundred families that made up Britain's ruling class, at the center of cultural and political life in late-Victorian/Edwardian Britain. Here are their complex, idiosyncratic lives; their opulent, privileged world; their romantic, roiling age. They were confidantes to British prime ministers, poets, writers, and artists, their lives entwined with the most celebrated and scandalous figures of the day, from Oscar Wilde to Henry James. They were the lovers of great men--or men of great prominence...Mary Wyndham, wilder than her wild brothers; lover of Wilfrid Blunt, confidante of Prime Minister Arthur Balfour (the Balfour Declaration); married to Hugo, Lord Elcho; later the Countess of Wemyss...Madeline Adeane, the quietest and happiest of the three...and Pamela, spoiled, beautiful, of the three, possesser of the true talent, wife of the Foreign Secretary Edward Grey (later Viscount Grey), who took Britain into the First World War. They lived in a world of luxurious excess, a world of splendor at 44 Belgrave Square, and later at the even more vast Clouds, the exquisite Wiltshire house on 4,000 acres, the "house of the age," designed, in 1876, by the visionary architect, Philip Webb; the model for Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton. They were bred with the pride of the Plantagenets and raised with a fierce belief that their family was exceptional. They avoided the norm at all costs and led the way to a blending of aristocracy and art. Their group came to be called The Souls, whose members from 1885 to the 1920s included the most distinguished politicians, artists, and thinkers of their time. In Those Wild Wyndhams, Claudia Renton gives us a dazzling portrait of one of England's grandest, noblest families. Renton captures, with nuance and depth, their complex wrangling between head and heart, and the tragedy at the center of all their lives as the privilege and bliss of the Victorian age gave way to the Edwardian era, the Great War, and the passing of an opulent world.

Download or read book Two Against the Tide written by Ann Lazarsfeld-Jensen and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2024-07-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Charles Seligman invited his wife, Brenda, to share his tent in 1907, he sanctioned a professional place for female fieldworkers in anthropology. Seligman was a groundbreaking pioneer of ethnographic work in Oceania and Africa. He treated shellshocked soldiers, he amassed museum collections and he fathered a generation of exceptional students. Brenda, his first student, became a scholar in her own right. Eighty years after his death, the Seligman legacy was deleted from the institution he began. Two Against the Tide explores how as wealthy Anglo-Jews, Charles and Brenda Seligman built a shared career through secret benevolence and silent endurance of hardship.

Download or read book Portraits of Violence written by Suzannah Biernoff and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portraits of Violence explores the image and idea of facial disfigurement in one of its most troubling modern formations, as a symbol and consequence of war. It opens with Nina Berman’s iconic photograph Marine Wedding, which provoked a debate about the medical, military, and psychological response to serious combat injuries. While these issues remain urgent, it is equally crucial to interrogate the representation of war and injury. The concepts of valor, heroism, patriotism, and courage assume visible form and do their cultural work when they are personified and embodied. The mutilated or disabled veteran’s body can connote the brutalizing, dehumanizing potential of modern combat. Suzannah Biernoff draws on a wide variety of sources mainly from WWI but also contemporary photography and computer games. Each chapter revolves around particular images: Marine Wedding is discussed alongside Stuart Griffiths’ portraits of British veterans; Henry Tonks’ drawings of WWI facial casualties are compared to the medical photographs in the Gillies Archives; the production of portrait masks for the severely disfigured is approached through the lens of documentary film and photography; and finally the haunting image of one of Tonks’s patients reappears in BioShock, a highly successful computer game. The book simultaneously addresses a neglected area in disability studies; puts disfigurement on the agenda for art history and visual studies; and makes a timely and provocative contribution to the literature on the First World War.

Download or read book The Unknown Warrior written by John Nichol and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-09-26 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'It is rare to find a tale so strange, intimate and human yet at the same time so enormous, so global in its importance. Yet again John Nichol impresses us with his ability to weave together the little details and the grand narrative' Dan Snow *** Over one million British Empire soldiers were killed during the First World War. More than a century later, more than half a million still have no known grave. The scale of the fighting, the destructive power of high explosive, and the combination of relentless military engagement and glutinous mud meant that many of the dead were never recovered or identified. Names were left without bodies, and bodies, or fragments of bodies, without names. In an emotional personal journey, Sunday Times bestselling author John Nichol uncovers the dramatic story of the Unknown Warrior who lies in Westminster Abbey, and our nation’s deep-seated need to honour and mourn the fallen. ‘A Soldier of the Great War Known Unto God.’ Rudyard Kipling In the aftermath of the First World War, an idea was born for a single ‘Unknown Warrior’ to commemorate every one of the missing, and help staunch the tidal flow of national grief. Echoed most recently by the funeral of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, each phase of his burial ceremony was choreographed with military precision, love, and respect. Former RAF Tornado Navigator and Gulf War prisoner-of-war John Nichol, retraces the Warrior’s journey home from the battlefields of Northern France to Westminster Abbey, talking to relatives of those involved and researching long-forgotten archives. How did the plan take shape? Who was this ‘unknown’ man? How was he chosen, and from where? What were the logistical challenges of repatriating a single body, whilst retaining its total anonymity? To help shine light on the 100-year-old story, John seeks out modern experts in battlefield trauma, the recovery of the slain, and the complexities of ceremonial interment on a grand scale. And speaking to those who have lost loved ones in more recent conflicts, he meditates upon our continuing need of a tangible resting place at which to truly grieve the fallen. Drawing on his own experience of military service and combat, Nichol explores the way individuals and nations have marked the sacrifice of their dead across the ages. Above all, The Unknown Warrior is a search for the true meaning of camaraderie, service and remembrance.

Download or read book The Girl on the Cliff written by Lucinda Riley and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the #1 international bestseller The Orchid House, the mesmerizing story of two Irish families entangled by a tragic past that seems destined to repeat itself To escape a recent heartbreak in New York, Grania Ryan returns to her family home on the rugged, wind-swept coast of Ireland. Here, on the cliff edge in the middle of a storm, she meets a young girl, Aurora Lisle, who will profoundly change her life. Despite the warnings Grania receives from her mother to be wary of the Lisle family, Aurora and Grania forge a close friendship. Through a trove of old family letters dating from 1914, Grania begins to learn just how deeply their families’ histories are entwined. The horrors of World War I, the fate of a beautiful foundling child, and the irresistible lure of the ballet give rise to a legacy of heartache that leaves its imprint on each new generation. Ultimately, it will be Aurora whose intuition and spirit may be able to unlock the chains of the past. Sweeping from Edwardian England to present-day New York, from the majestic Irish coast to the crumbling splendor of a legendary London town house, The Girl on the Cliff introduces two remarkable women whose quest to understand their past sends them toward a future where love can triumph over loss.

Download or read book The Bloomsbury Look written by Wendy Hitchmough and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-02 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth study of how the famed Bloomsbury Group expressed their liberal philosophies and collective identity in visual form "[Fascinating and wide-ranging. . . . Will be enjoyed by both Bloomsbury aficionados and newcomers alike."--Lucinda Willan, V&A Magazine The Bloomsbury Group was a loose collective of forward-thinking writers, artists, and intellectuals in London, with Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and E. M. Forster among its esteemed members. The group's works and radical beliefs, spanning literature, economics, politics, and non-normative relationships, changed the course of 20th-century culture and society. Although its members resisted definition, their art and dress imparted a coherent, distinctive group identity. Drawing on unpublished photographs and extensive new research, The Bloomsbury Look is the first in-depth analysis of how the Bloomsbury Group generated and broadcast its self-fashioned aesthetic. One chapter is dedicated to photography, which was essential to the group's visual narrative--from casual snapshots, to amateur studio portraits, to family albums. Others examine the Omega Workshops as a design center, and the evidence for its dress collections, spreading the Bloomsbury aesthetic to the general public. Finally, the book considers the group's extensive participation in 20th-century modernism as artists, models, curators, critics, and collectors.

Download or read book Conchies written by Andy Ward and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the centenary of the Great War, we hear and read of valiant and heroic stories. There is another story, one less spoken of. The story of the people who refused to fight for their country. Today, the individuals mentioned in this book would be the focus of internet trolls. In their own day they elicited an equally vehement reaction from their communities. These were the people who refused to fight for their country, and they were known as 'Conscientious Objectors'. This book provides a remarkable testimony about the experiences of conscientious objectors and their treatment at the hands of the state. It contradicts the received view that these objectors were treated universally brutally by the army, the prison system and the government, and is bound to lead to a modification of the orthodox view. Andy Ward was given access to 300 letters that had been discovered in a local family’s attic. They record a correspondence from 1916 to the end of the war between Leonard and Roland Payne, two brothers who chose to become conscientious objectors, and their friends and family. The letters follow their journey as the authorities attempted to dissuade them from their course of action, through punishment, until finally they were placed in a situation where they could be useful. Conchies is not a work of purely local history. Rather, it is a case study: local history in a national context and national history in a local context. It is also a very human story, treated with balance and thought. It will appeal to those interested in the First World War, civilian experiences of the War, British social history, the evolving nature of public opinion and the ethical and moral issues of conscience.

Download or read book Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar Britain written by Rishona Zimring and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social dance was ubiquitous in interwar Britain. The social mingling and expression made possible through non-theatrical participatory dancing in couples and groups inspired heated commentary, both vociferous and subtle. By drawing attention to the ways social dance accrued meaning in interwar Britain, Rishona Zimring redefines and brings needed attention to a phenomenon that has been overshadowed by other developments in the history of dance. Social dance, Zimring argues, haunted the interwar imagination, as illustrated in trends such as folk revivalism and the rise of therapeutic dance education. She brings to light the powerful figurative importance of popular music and dance both in the aftermath of war, and during Britain’s entrance into cosmopolitan modernity and the modernization of gender relations. Analyzing paintings, films, memoirs, a ballet production, and archival documents, in addition to writings by Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Vivienne Eliot, and T.S. Eliot, to name just a few, Zimring provides crucial insights into the experience, observation, and representation of social dance during a time of cultural transition and recuperation. Social dance was pivotal in the construction of modern British society as well as the aesthetics of some of the period’s most prominent intellectuals.

Download or read book Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson written by Elizabeth Maslen and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-05 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Maslen's excellent biography offers a fresh look at the intersection of Jameson's life and work and the way these intersected with figures from Rebecca West to Arthur Koeslter to Czeslaw Milosz.

Download or read book Servants written by Lucy Lethbridge and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-century Britain is the social history of the last century through the eyes of those who served. From the butler, the footman, the maid and the cook of 1900 to the au pairs, cleaners and childminders who took their place seventy years later, a previously unheard class offers a fresh perspective on a dramatic century. Here, the voices of servants and domestic staff, largely ignored by history, are at last brought to life: their daily household routines, attitudes towards their employers, and to each other, throw into sharp and intimate relief the period of feverish social change through which they lived. Sweeping in its scope, extensively researched and brilliantly observed,Servants is an original and fascinating portrait of twentieth-century Britain; an authoritative history that will change and challenge the way we look at society.

Download or read book A Year in the Life of Downton Abbey companion to series 5 written by Jessica Fellowes and published by Headline. This book was released on 2014-09-25 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's 1924 and there have been many changes in the world of Downton Abbey since we were first welcomed by the family and their servants twelve years ago. A generation of men has been tragically lost at the front, there are once again children breathing new life into the great house, a chauffeur now sits at the Grantham dinner table and hems are up by several inches. Yet despite all of this unsettling upheaval, it is a comfort to find that many things at Downton remain largely unchanged. There are still parties to be thrown, summer fetes to be organised, menus to be planned and farms to be run. Join us, then, as we explore the seasonal events and celebrations of the great estate - Christmas, Easter, the debutante season, the hunt and more - and peer with us through the prism of the house as we learn more about the lives of our favourite characters, the actors who play them, and those who create the world we love so much. Packed full of exclusive new photography and brimming with traditional British recipes for each calendar month, such as Eton mess and sloe gin, this beautiful book takes us on a fascinating journey through a year in the life of Downton Abbey.

Download or read book Philanthropy and Voluntary Action in the First World War written by Peter Grant and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges scholarship which presents charity and voluntary activity during World War I as marking a downturn from the high point of the late Victorian period. Charitable donations rose to an all-time peak, and the scope and nature of charitable work shifted decisively. Far more working class activists, especially women, became involved, although there were significant differences between the suburban south and industrial north of England and Scotland. The book also corrects the idea that charitably-minded civilians’ efforts alienated the men at the front, in contrast to the degree of negativity that surrounds much previous work on voluntary action in this period. Far from there being an unbridgeable gap in understanding or empathy between soldiers and civilians, the links were strong, and charitable contributions were enormously important in maintaining troop morale. This bond significantly contributed to the development and maintenance of social capital in Britain, which, in turn, strongly supported the war effort. This work draws on previously unused primary sources, notably those regarding the developing role of the UK’s Director General of Voluntary Organizations and the regulatory legislation of the period.