A novel by Susan Hill.

Building upon his earlier book The Death of the German Cousin (1986), renowned author Peter Edgerly Firchow focuses Strange Meetings on major modern British writers from Eliot to Auden and explores the development of British conceptions and misconceptions of Germany and Germans from 1910 to 1960.

Strange Meetings provides a highly original account of the War Poets of 1914-1918, written through a series of actual encounters, or near-encounters, from Siegfried Sassoon's first, blushing meeting with Rupert Brooke over kidneys and bacon at Eddie Marsh's breakfasts before the war, through famous moments like Sassoon's encouragement of Owen when both are in hospital at the same time; on to the poignant meeting between Edward Thomas's widow and Ivor Gurney in 1932; and the last, strange lunch and 'longish talk' of Sassoon and David Jones in 1964, half a century after the great war began. Among the other poets and writers we encounter are Vera Brittain, Roland Leighton, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Nichols and Edmund Blunden. Ricketts's unusual approach allows him to follow their relationships, marking their responses to each other's work and showing how these affected their own poetry - one potent strand, for example, is the profound influence of Brooke, both as a model to follow and a burden to reject. The stories become intensely personal and vivid - we come to know each of the poets, their family and intellectual backgrounds and their very different personalities. And while the accounts of individual lives achieve the imaginative vividness of a novel, they also give us an entirely fresh sense of Georgian poetry, conveying all the excitement and frustration of poetic creation, and demonstrating how the whole notion of what poetry should be 'about' became fractured and changed for ever by the terrible experiences of the war.

British artist Clare Woods is internationally regarded as one of the most significant painters working today. Her paintings and works on paper are found in important public and private collections around the world, and she has produced many highprofile public commissions in the UK and Europe. Her highly colouristic paintings in oil or gloss paint on aluminium of strange, dark landscapes and anthropomorphic forms hover somewhere between abstraction and representation, expressing both a poetic romanticism and an unnerving psychic charge. This beautifully designed and illustrated volume is the first monograph on Woods' art. It presents all the major works from her career to date, from small-scale intimate paintings and prints to ambitious large-scale architectural projects. The dynamic layout of the book, with a varied mix of close-up detail and installation shots, gives the reader a strong sense of the diverse scale and immersive, push-pull nature of the paintings. Five prominent writers consider various aspects of her practice, including her use of photographic source material; her engagement with the traditions of landscape and figurative art; her relationship with artistic forebears, such as Francis Bacon, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland; the context of painting practice today and twenty-firstcentury culture; and the connections between her life and work.

“The very content of Owen’s poems was, and still is, pertinent to the feelings of young men facing death and the terrors of war.” —The New York Times Book Review Wilfred Owen was twenty-two when he enlisted in the Artists’ Rifle Corps during World War I. By the time Owen was killed at the age of 25 at the Battle of Sambre, he had written what are considered the most important British poems of WWI. This definitive edition is based on manuscripts of Owen’s papers in the British Museum and other archives.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.

When Clare Farramond goes to the historic home of Sir Stephen Finch-Boyes, there to act as a tutor to his young daughter, Isabel, it is with sadness in her heart. For still alive within her is the memory of Michael - the man who had been her whole world - the man who had sworn her his undying love. The man who had betrayed her. A captivating love story from the 100-million-copy bestselling Queen of Romance, first published in 1952, and available now for the first time in eBook.