Now All Roads Lead to France: A Life of Edward Thomas


Book Description

Winner of the Costa Biography Award, a fascinating exploration of one of the 20th century's most influential poets.




The Annotated Collected Poems


Book Description

Edward Thomas wrote a lifetime's poetry in two years. Already a dedicated prose writer and influential critic, he became a poet only in December 1914. In April 1917 he was killed at Arras. This book includes all his poems and draws on freshly available archive material.




All Roads Lead to France


Book Description

Interweaving letters from men at the front with stories of life at home, this book describes the Great War's impact on the city of Bath. It is a story of grief, suffering and anger - but also features laughter. With minor variations, it could be the story of almost any town or city in the country at that time.




The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography


Book Description

"A witty, engaging narrative style…[Robb's] approach is particularly engrossing." —New York Times Book Review A narrative of exploration—full of strange landscapes and even stranger inhabitants—that explains the enduring fascination of France. While Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris, large parts of France were still terra incognita. Even in the age of railways and newspapers, France was a land of ancient tribal divisions, prehistoric communication networks, and pre-Christian beliefs. French itself was a minority language. Graham Robb describes that unknown world in arresting narrative detail. He recounts the epic journeys of mapmakers, scientists, soldiers, administrators, and intrepid tourists, of itinerant workers, pilgrims, and herdsmen with their millions of migratory domestic animals. We learn how France was explored, charted, and colonized, and how the imperial influence of Paris was gradually extended throughout a kingdom of isolated towns and villages. The Discovery of France explains how the modern nation came to be and how poorly understood that nation still is today. Above all, it shows how much of France—past and present—remains to be discovered. A New York Times Notable Book, Publishers Weekly Best Book, Slate Best Book, and Booklist Editor's Choice.




Edward Thomas: from Adlestrop to Arras


Book Description

This is the extraordinary life of a poetic genius. Along with Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas is by any reckoning a major first world war poet. A war poet is not one who chooses to commemorate or celebrate a war, but one who reacts against having a war thrust upon him. His great friend Robert Frost wrote 'his poetry is so very brave, so unconsciously brave.' Apart from a most illuminating understanding of his poetry, Dr Wilson shows how Thomas' life alone makes for absorbing reading: his early marriage, his dependence on laudanum, his friendships with Joseph Conrad, Edward Garnett, Rupert Brooke and Hilaire Belloc among others. The novelist Eleanor Farjeon entered into a curious menage a trois with him and his wife. He died in France in 1917, on the first day of the Battle of Arras. This is the stuff of which myths are made and posterity has been quick to oblige. But this has tended to obscure his true worth as a writer, as Dr Wilson argues. Edward Thomas's poems were not published until some months after his death, but they have never since been out of print. Described by Ted Hughes as 'the father of us all', Thomas's distinctively modern sensibility is probably the one most in tune with our twenty-first century outlook. He occupies a crucial place in the development of twentieth century poetry.




Selected Poems and Prose


Book Description

'I have come to the borders of sleep, The unfathomable deep Forest where all must lose Their way, however straight, Or winding, soon or late; They cannot choose.' Fired by his abiding love of the English landscape, the poetry of Edward Thomas is some of the most astonishing of the twentieth century. A journalist, essayist and critic for many years, he was encouraged to write verse by his friend Robert Frost. He produced a late outburst of poetry of extraordinary beauty and mystery about the subjects closest to his heart: rural England and its inhabitants, landscape, atmosphere, transience, endurance and death. By 1917, when he was killed on the Western Front, he had earned his place as one of England's most valued poets. This selection brings together his finest verse with his most vivid prose writings on the countryside.




Edward Thomas [and] Robert Frost


Book Description

Contains poems, without any commentary, enabling them to be used either as student reference material or as 'clean' copies for the examination.




All Signs Point to Paris


Book Description

"This one brims with magic... An absolute page-turner and joy to read!" -- Jane Green, New York Times bestselling author Propulsive, touching, and darkly funny, All Signs Point to Paris is the story of one woman's search for a second chance at love. A surprising astrology reading sends Natasha Sizlo--divorced, broke, freshly heartbroken, and reeling from her father's death--on an unexpected but magical journey to France, in pursuit of a man born on a particular date in a particular place: November 2, 1968 in Paris. It's the cusp of Natasha Sizlo's forty-fourth birthday. Still reeling from her disastrous divorce, she's navigating life as a single mom and doing her best to fake it till she makes it in the cutthroat world of LA real estate. In the meantime, her ex-husband is dating a Hollywood star, and she's just broken it off--for the hundredth and final time--with her devastatingly handsome but impossibly noncommittal French boyfriend. Just when it seems things can't get any worse, her beloved father is given months to live. So when she's gifted a session with LA's most sought-after astrologist, Natasha--despite being a total skeptic--figures she has nothing to lose. The reading is eerily, impossibly accurate. As her misgivings give way, Natasha can't help but ask about her ex-boyfriend, the French man she can't seem to get over. To her surprise, the astrologist tells her that he is perfect for her. His birthday and birthplace--November 2, 1968, in Paris, France--lines up with her astrological point of destiny. The word husband comes up. Natasha is distraught. Panicked, even. Was he really The One? Was this all the big soul love she was destined for? Then, she has a lightning bolt of an idea: her ex wasn't the only man born on November 2, 1968, in Paris. Natasha's real soulmate is still out there--she just has to find him. Joined by her sister and two of her closest girlfriends and buoyed by her father's parting message to never give up on love, Natasha flies to the City of Light, determined to take destiny into her own hands.




The Old Ways


Book Description

From the acclaimed author of The Wild Places and Underland, an exploration of walking and thinking In this exquisitely written book, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge, England, home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths that crisscross both the British landscape and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, and of pilgrimage and ritual. Told in Macfarlane’s distinctive voice, The Old Ways folds together natural history, cartography, geology, archaeology and literature. His walks take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird islands of the Scottish northwest, from Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas. Along the way he crosses paths with walkers of many kinds—wanderers, pilgrims, guides, and artists. Above all this is a book about walking as a journey inward and the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move. Macfarlane discovers that paths offer not just a means of traversing space, but of feeling, knowing, and thinking.




Under Storm's Wing


Book Description

Here is a portrait of the poet by his wife which has no equal, not even in Mary Shelley's sketches of her husband.New StatesmanUnder Storm's Wing collects all that Helen Thomas (1877-1967) wrote about the poet Edward Thomas (1878-1917): the celebrated volumes As It Was and World Without End, her letters to Edward, and separate memoirs of her meetings with W.H. Davies, D.H. Lawrence, Ivor Gurney, Eleanor Farjeon, Robert Frost and W.H. Hudson. The book has been assembled by Myfanwy, the youngest daughter of Edward and Helen. Myfanwy includes her own enchanted account of childhood with her father, and the tragedy of his death at the Battle of Arras in 1917. She adds an appendix of six letters from Robert Frost to Edward Thomas.Helen wrote As It Was, the story of her courtship and early marriage, shortly after Edward's death, and World Without End a few years later. In the original editions and later reprints fictitious names were used for the protagonists. In this edition the actual names are restored.The book provides a brilliant, lasting evocation of one of Britain's best-loved poets.