""Homage to Catalonia"" is George Orwell's riveting account ofhis experiences in the Spanish Civil War, but don't expect anysunbathing on the beaches of Barcelona! This is no ordinarytravel memoir. Orwell, better known for sending chills down ourspines with '1984', now takes us on a different kind of journey -one where bullets replace postcards and comradeship is the onlysouvenir worth bringing back. Dive into the heart of politicalturmoil, where Orwell's wit meets the gritty reality of war, anddiscover a side of Spain that no tourist brochure will ever showyou. Get ready for a holiday from your typical history book - thisone comes with a side of revolution!
A Man Could Stand Up¿ opens on Armistice Day, with Valentine Wannop learning that her love, Christopher Tietjens, has returned to London from the front. As she prepares to meet him, the narrative suddenly shifts time and place to earlier in the year, with Tietjens commanding a group of soldiers in a trench somewhere in the war zone. Tietjens leads his company bravely as they shelter from the constant German strafes, before the narrative again jumps to conclude with an actual Armistice Day celebration.In this simple narrative Ford creates dense, complex character studies of Valentine and Tietjens. Tietjens, often called ¿the last Tory¿ for his staunch and unwavering approach to honor, duty, and fidelity, has changed greatly from the man he was in the previous installments in the series. Ford explores the psychological horror that the Great War inflicted on its combatants through the lens of Valentine¿s gentle curiosity about Tietjen¿s time on the front: men returned from battle injured not just in body, but in soul, too. The constant, unrelenting shelling, the endless strafes, the clouds of poison gas, the instant death of friends and comrades for no reason at all, the muddy and grim entrenchments where men lived and died¿all of these permanently changed soldiers in ways that previous wars didn¿t. Now the ¿last Tory¿ wants nothing more than to retreat from society and live a quiet life with the woman he loves¿who is not his wife.As we follow Valentine and Tietjens through the last day of the war, we see how the Great War was not just the destruction of men, but of an entire era.
Some Do Not ¿ opens at the cusp of World War I. Christopher Tietjens, a government statistician, and his friend Vincent Macmaster, an aspiring literary critic, are visiting the English countryside. Tietjens, preoccupied with his disastrous marriage, meets Valentine Wannop, a suffragette, during a round of golf. As their love story develops, the novel explores the horrors of the war without the narrative ever entering the battlefield.The characters are complex and nuanced. Tietjens is an old-fashioned man even by the standards of his day; he¿s concerned with honor and doing the right thing, but he lives in a society that only pays those values lip service. Yet he himself isn¿t free of a thread of hypocrisy: he won¿t leave his deeply unhappy marriage because that would be the wrong way to act, but the reader is left wondering if he tolerates his situation simply because he married up in class. He wants to do to the noble and right thing, but does that mean going to war?The men and women around him each have their individual motivations, and they are often conniving and unlikable in their aspirations even as the propaganda of England at war paints the country as a moral and heroic one. The delicate interplay of each character¿s subtleties paints a rich portrait of 1920s English society, as the romantic ideals of right and wrong clash with notions of ambition and practicality.The prose is unapologetically modernist: unannounced time shifts combine with a stream-of-consciousness style that can often be dense. Yet Ford¿s portrayal of shell shock, the politics of women in the 1920s, and the moral greyness of wartime is groundbreaking. The book, and its complete tetralogy¿called Parade¿s End¿has garnered praise from critics and authors alike, with Anthony Burgess calling it ¿the finest novel about the First World War¿ and William Carlos Williams stating that the novels ¿constitute the English prose masterpiece of their time.¿
No More Parades is the second in Ford Madox Ford¿s Parade¿s End series. The book, released just a few years after the close of the war, is based on Ford¿s combat experiences as an enlisted man in World War I, and continues the story first begun in Some Do Not ¿.Christopher Tietjens, after recovering from the shell shock he suffered in Some Do Not ¿, has returned to the edge of the war as a commanding officer in charge of preparing draft troops for deployment to the front. As the ¿last true Tory,¿ Tietjens demonstrates talent bordering on genius as he struggles against the laziness, incompetence, and confusion of the army around him¿but his troubles only begin when his self-centered and scandalous wife Sylvia appears at his base in Rouen for a surprise visit.Unlike Some Do Not ¿, which was told in a highly modernist series of flash-backs and flash-forwards, Parade¿s End is a much more straightforward narrative. Despite this, the characters continue to be realized in an incredibly complex and nuanced way. Tietjens, almost a caricature of the stiff, honorable English gentleman, stoically absorbs the problems and suffering of those around him. Ford simultaneously paints him as an almost Christlike character and an immature, idealistic schoolboy, eager to keep up appearances despite the ruination it causes the people around him. Sylvia, his wife, has had her affairs and scandals, and is clearly a selfish and trying personality; but her powerful charm, and her frustration with both her almost comically stiff-lipped husband and the war¿s interruption of civilization, lends her a not-unsympathetic air. The supporting cast of conscripts and officers is equally well-realized, with each one protraying a separate aspect of war¿s effect on regular, scared people simply doing their best.The novel was extremely well-reviewed in its time, and it and the series it¿s a part of remain one of the most important novels written about World War I.
The British author Ford Madox Ford published a book titled ''The Good Soldier'' is a Tale of Passion in 1915. It takes place just before World War I and details the tragedy of Edward Ashburnham's marriage, which on the surface seemed flawless, as well as that of his two American friends. The book's narrative is told in a non-chronological order of flashbacks; Ford's groundbreaking interpretation of literary impressionism included this literary trick. Ford successfully employs the tactic of the unreliable narrator as the main character gradually reveals a version of events that is considerably different from what the beginning leads the reader to assume. The book was based somewhat on two instances of infidelity as well as Ford's complicated personal life. The Saddest Story was the book's initial title, but the publishers requested a change when World War I broke out. Ford coined the satirical phrase "The Good Soldier," and it became popular. On the Modern Library's 1998 list of the top 100 English-language books released during the 20th century, The Good Soldier was ranked number thirty. The BBC ranked the best 100 British books of 2015, and The Good Soldier came in at number thirteen.
No More Parades: A novel, has been regarded as significant work throughout human history, and in order to ensure that this work is never lost, we have taken steps to ensure its preservation by republishing this book in a contemporary format for both current and future generations. This entire book has been retyped, redesigned, and reformatted. Since these books are not made from scanned copies, the text is readable and clear.
This early work by Ford Madox Ford was originally published in 1924 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. This is part one of Ford's hugely successful Parade's End tetralogy that has now been adapted into a BBC television drama. Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Madox Hueffer in Merton, Surrey, England on 17th December 1873. The creative arts ran in his family - Hueffer's grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, was a well-known painter, and his German émigré father was music critic of The Times - and after a brief dalliance with music composition, the young Hueffer began to write. Although Hueffer never attended university, during his early twenties he moved through many intellectual circles, and would later talk of the influence that the "Middle Victorian, tumultuously bearded Great" - men such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle - exerted on him. In 1908, Hueffer founded the English Review, and over the next 15 months published Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Galsworthy and W. B. Yeats, and gave débuts to many authors, including D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas. Hueffer's editorship consolidated the classic canon of early modernist literature, and saw him earn a reputation as of one of the century's greatest literary editors. Ford continued to write through the thirties, producing fiction, non-fiction, and two volumes of autobiography: Return to Yesterday (1931) and It was the Nightingale (1933). In his last years, he taught literature at the Olivet College in Michigan. Ford died on 26th June 1939 in Deauville, France, at the age of 65.
Determined not to write a biography about his friend Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) in the usual dry style, Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) instead produced a novel. As a result, some biographical facts are given less emphasis than others, in particular the acrimony which later blighted relations between the two men. But the work is distinguished by its liveliness and by a wealth of vivid detail. Ford describes Conrad's remarkably long-eared horse, his haphazard use of adverbs and their fraught collaboration over their second joint novel, Romance, during which Ford's carefully unexciting style provoked the adventure-loving Conrad to depression. Ford's impressionistic portrayal of Conrad as an elegant, likeable swindler and 'beautiful genius' strikes a far richer chord than a purely historical account. First published in 1924, just after Conrad's death, this work remains a striking example of creative non-fiction, instructive for scholars and students of English literature.
2020 Reprint of the 1915 Edition. Ford's 1915 novel is set just before World War I and chronicles the tragedy of Edward Ashburnham, the soldier to whom the title refers, and his seemingly perfect marriage plus that of his two American friends. The novel is told using a series of flashbacks in non-chronological order, a literary technique that formed part of Ford's pioneering view of literary impressionism. Ford employs the device of the unreliable narrator to great effect as the main character gradually reveals a version of events that is quite different from what the introduction leads the reader to believe. The novel was loosely based on two incidents of adultery and on Ford's messy personal life. Using pre-First World War Europe as its stage, The Good Soldier is the story of Edward Ashburnham, his wife Leonora, and their friends, John and Florence Dowell. The eponymous Good Soldier, Edward embodies upper-class English values but behind closed doors carries on a long-running affair with Florence. When Florence's husband, John, discovers the affair, he sets in motion a series of events both tragic and unavoidable.
The Good Soldier opens with the famous line: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." John Dowell, half of one of the couples whose dissolving relationships form the subject of the novel, chronicles the tragedy of Edward Ashburnham, the soldier to whom the title refers. Dowell tells a winding tale of passion and deceit in a rambling, non-chronological fashion-a literary technique that formed part of Ford's pioneering view of literary impressionism. Ford's masterful use of the unreliable narrator leaves the reader to consider the true nature of the events that unfold. This Warbler Classics edition includes The Affair Perfected by Paul Wiley, a key critical essay that situates The Good Soldier in relation to Ford's other work and artistic aims, as well as a detailed biographical timeline. "One of the finest novels of our century." -Graham Greene
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