Author: Mike West

In 1916 on an isolated country estate just outside London, Captain Chris Baldry, a shell-shocked captain suffering from amnesia, makes a bittersweet homecoming to the three women who have helped shape his life. Will the devoted wife he can no longer recollect, the favorite cousin he remembers only as a childhood friend, and the poor innkeeper's daughter he once courted leave Chris to languish in a safe, dreamy past--or will they help him recover his memory so that he can return to the front? The answer is revealed through a heart-wrenching, unexpected sacrifice. (Summary from Wikipedia).

Published posthumously in 1919, this collection of diary entries presents a scathing picture of army life and is said to be one of the most vivid accounts of daily life in the trenches. It chronicles West's increasing disillusion with war and his move toward pacifist and atheist beliefs. The final part consists of his powerful war poems, including <i>God, How I Hate You, You Young Cheerful Men</i>, and <i>Night Patrol</i>. West was killed by a sniper in 1917. In view of some of his poems, one wonders if death was not unwelcome. (Introduction adapted from Wikipedia by Ruth Golding)

In the late eighteenth century, English writers discovered the landscape, not only in the paintings of Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin and Salvator Rosa, but also as a place to be visited and viewed as if it were a picture. No part of England was more discovered in this period than the Lake District, which was transformed over the course of the next century from a remote region of farmland and inaccessible hills into a wild and romantic landscape of picturesque lake and mountain, described in works such as Thomas West’s A guide to the Lakes (1778). West’s predecessors – Thomas Gray, Arthur Young, Thomas Pennant and William Hutchinson –had merely passed through the Lakes. West, a resident of the Lakes, took the reader on a tour of the district as a whole, visiting all the lakes, with the sole exception of Wastwater. A devotee of the Claude glass – a convex, tinted mirror in which the landscape appears as it might in a painting by Lorrain – West follows and improves upon Gray’s technique of identifying ‘stations’ from which the landscape would appear at its most picturesque. West’s guide remains something of a hybrid, however, with its lengthy antiquarian descriptions of the surrounding towns of Lancaster, Penrith and Kendal. - Summary by Phil Benson

This 1926 collection of sixteen essays on religion by well-known people (mostly authors) in the early 20th century brings together articles written originally in the popular press of the time (The London Daily Express): Arnold Bennett, Hugh Walpole, Rebecca West; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Compton Mackenzie, J.D. Beresford; Israel Zangwill, H deVere Stacpoole, Henry Arthur Jones, and several prominent clergy. - summary by david wales