Four devastating years told by twenty eyewitnesses showing not just what the First World War was, but what it was like to live through
Peter Englund is an award-winning, bestselling Swedish historian. Having been a professor at Uppsala University, in 2008 he was appointed the new Permanent Secretary of Swedish Academy, the body that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature. His breakthrough book on the Battle of Poltava was published to universal critical acclaim and sold over 250,000 copies in Sweden alone.
Peter Englund is one of the finest writers of our time on the
tactics, the killing and the psychology of war. In The Beauty and
the Sorrow he superbly and humanely brings to life all the tragedy,
chaos, death and gunsmoke of battle
*Simon Sebag Montefiore*
A wonderfully wide and rich mosaic of personal experience from the
First World War
*Antony Beevor*
Extraordinary ... a work of magnificent, elegiac seriousness
*Guardian*
A haunting mosaic of the experiences of war. The layers of voices
build to create a richly complex and rarely heard account of the
First World War that lingers in the memory long after the final
page. Immensely powerful.
*Juliet Gardiner, author of 'The Blitz'*
He conjures up the atmosphere over and over again with just a few
stark words. I loved all the detail... inspiring.
*Margaret Forster*
By turns pithy, lyrical, colourful, poignant and endlessly
absorbing. An exquisite book.
*Kirkus Reviews (starred)*
A brilliant feat of retrospective journalism
*Publishers Weekly (starred)*
Intense and bighearted . . . Englund's volume joins an
unconventional pantheon . . . The accounts of [these] lives can be
terrifying or stirring, but are most fully alive in Englund's
accumulation of small moments, stray details . . . His book has the
most devastating ending I can remember in a piece of
nonfiction.
*New York Times*
Like no other, this book brings out in a poignant and effective way
the meaning of World War I for those who lived through it
*Prof Sir Lawrence Freedman*
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