A Moment of War (Penguin Modern Classics)

Product Information

You could pick out the British by their nervous jerking heads, native air of suspicion, and constant stream of self-effacing jokes.

War isn't all about fighting; there is plenty of drudgery and idleness to go around, and seldom a glance at the enemy except when he flies over and bombs hell out of you. Laurie Lee published four collections of poems: The Sun My Monument (1944), The Bloom of Candles (1947), My Many-Coated Man (1955) and Pocket Poems (1960). is also a reminder that irony, so debased in the ordinary way of speech, is something more than odd coincidence or amusing contradiction. For Laurie Lee, the success of his early memoir, "Cider With Rosie," published in 1959, was both a blessing and a curse. His passport is the cause of the problem; a year previously he had travelled to Morocco, visiting the exact places where Franco and his generals were plotting.He could not persuade anyone to help him and so eventually crossed the Pyrenees alone in a snowstorm. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. With great vividness and poignancy, Lee portrays the brave defeat of youthful idealism in Auden's 'low dishonest decade'. I was at that flush of youth which never doubts self-survival, without which illusion few wars would be possible.

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. Written long after parts one and two and quite a short volume, this still is a very interesting read with a lot of the traits that is Lee's great narrative. Really, there’s such little emotional at all I couldn’t tell how Lee felt about anything, or if he really even cared to be there.

All is not lost: Lee does manage to get laid a couple of times, and occasionally they are able to scrape up enough cash for a meal in a bar. So far, we are vey close to the end of December, but, according to Laurie, now starts the offensive against Teruel, something that had started on December 15th! And yet there is an evanescent, very knowing sensibility at work as well, especially exposed in the murky, fluid issue of sexuality. Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy. Lee, now 79 years old, said in a telephone interview from that home, where he is struggling with an inner-ear infection.