276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man

£4.995£9.99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

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. His solitary life does not seem to be broken up by much companionship of his own age until he meets Stephen Colwood, the son of a rector and fellow enthusiast in both the hunt and the related point-to-point races they spawn. The deaths, horrible as they were, seemed very predictable, even as the sober descriptions allowed the horror to become something.

VG copy [scattered light creasing, top edge foxing] in spine toned Dust Wrapper with a few short edge tears/nicking. Never out of print since its original publication in 1928, when it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Sassoon's reminiscences about childhood and the beginning of World War I are channeled through young George Sherston, whose life of local cricket tournaments and fox-hunts falls apart as war approaches and he joins up to fight.The fact that we have followed Sherston's whole life makes the war so much more shocking than if the book had begun in 1914. Now and and again a leisurely five-nine shell passes overhead in the blue air where the larks are singing.

Hardcover Good Coward McCann 1930 first American edition Hardcover, with no dust jacket Cover shows some edgewear on extremities, fairly minor Pages unmarked Binding sound. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines.We have grown to love George and his friends, who are young, fearless, fun and have their whole lives ahead of them. These memories of halcyon days sustain Sassoon as he fights the mud, the Germans, and the creeping fear of insanity. What is certain is that, just as in Proust, all these "insignificant episodes" are steeped in irony. By excising his Jewishness (he was not religious, his father having been rejected by his very correct anglo-indian family for marrying a christian for love) Sassoon removes the most obvious barrier to Sherston's social mobility and makes him seem reticent in a manner which rings false to his personality.

Graves and Sassoon did fight and saw the chaos of war and the shattering of lives and they both went off on other tangents rather than embracing modernism.Not once does he describe the death of a fox – but several times he expresses sympathy for the animals and describes the end result as a nasty business. Most of all, he lambasts himself: "The mental condition of a young man who asks nothing more of life than twelve hundred a year and four days a week with the Packlestone is perhaps not easy to defend. Fricourt was successfully taken, and on the 4th July the First Battalion moved up to the front line to attack Mametz Wood. Yes, Sassoon portrays a halcyon world – but, as the author observed 40 years later, it all adds up to "innocently insidious anti-war propaganda", and not just because of the blunt fact that the war sweeps away something so lovingly and beautifully described. Possessed of an inherited income that allowed him to avoid work, Sherston spends his winters fox hunting and his summers playing cricket, and very little else.

After a riding accident which put him out of action, in May 1915 he joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers as a second lieutenant. The story of his aunt making tea on the train with a small spirit lamp is hilarious as is Sassoon’s own embarrassed reaction trying to pretend it wasn’t happening. The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. It is a semi-autobiographical novel that tells one man's experience at the end of England's Edwardian summer.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. Although I had some interest in Sassoon I put the book down when it was apparent the book was actually about fox hunting. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, published in 1928 and attractively reissued by Faber, is that ideal Englishman’s regretful (sometimes slightly cloyingly nostalgic) lament for an ideal, vanished England.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment