A Moment of War (Penguin Modern Classics)

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kind of indulgence, the adjectival bog, you find in the memoirs of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who also happened to be walking across Europe about the same time as Mr. In paragraph after paragraph, scene after scene of this book, the reader comes upon terse non sequiturs, because the only pattern in Mr. The book then recounts Lee's experiences as a Republican soldier in Figueres, Valencia, Tarazona, Madrid, Teruel and Barcelona. Also, the idea of just walking away from everything stirred my wanderlust, even though I did little about it for many years. Unser Produktfoto entspricht dem hier angebotenen Artikel, dieser weist folgende Merkmale auf: Helle/saubere Seiten in fester Bindung.

The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time.Laurie Lee was still a young man when he decided to fight for the Republican cause in Spain’s civil war. He also wrote three bestselling volumes of autobiography: Cider with Rosie (1959), which has sold over six million copies worldwide, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991).

Laurie Lee was still a young man when he decided to fight for the Republican cause in Spain's civil war. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. This book compares favourably with anything written by Hemingway and Orwell on the same subject and exposes the individual's fragility in the face of political ambition.On inspection of his passport, it is revealed that he spent time in the South and in Morocco, the birthplace of Franco’s coup attempt at the time the plotting was taking place. It could have used some photos, and I think that Lee holds off on saying things that might make himself look bad, but the writing and story are superb. The Omnibus Edition Red Sky at Sunrise - Comprising the Trilogy Cider With Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War. Nevertheless, A moment of War, is a chilling expose of the futility of warfare, the pointlessness of killing, the destruction of a society and the stagnation that pervaded the civil war in Spain.

If Franco captures Teruel, he will divide the Republicans to the north and south; as Lee explains, the loss of this fortified city in the mountains is the beginning of the retreat for the Republican army. I suspect that his purpose in writing the book was to bring home the horrors of war, and he does this remarkably well with his beautiful descriptive writing. The cold that winter was the most severe the country had ever known, people froze to death as well as were killed in the fighting. It is not the same as the other two books, it evokes, in Lee's rich descriptive, poetic prose the atmosphere of war, and particularly of a country at war with itself.They stay there for about a week, let's say six days, 7h, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th day of the journey).

But the train doesn't leave until the following day, that is to say, the 26th day of the journey, after experiencing a bombarment by the German and Italian airplanes. Though we may have looked at that time, in our wantonly tattered uniforms, more like prisoners of war than a crusading army, we were convinced that we possessed an invincible armament of spirit, and that in the eyes of the world, and the angels, we were on the right side of this struggle. Perez comes to his cell, and, after refusing to believe the version of young Laurie Lee, hands him over to four guards, the same guards who had met him the previous day. I felt such a jarr between his internment in the hole and then this youthful seduction that I put the book down.I had heard that sometimes people adorned their own biography, claiming participation in historical events in which they had no pat at all. For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels. The book is written in Lee’s distinct eloquent style again, making this a pleasure to read even though the subject is not particularly savoury and a fitting end to the series. Laurie Lee was back in England after his visit to Spain which ended in the start of the Spanish Civil War. After reading Orwell's superb Homage to Catalonia I jumped straight into Laurie Lee's own memoir of his time as an anti-fascist fighter in the Spanish Civil War.