Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man

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This is an interesting novel, not the simple evocation of a lost past that I was expecting; there is much more nuance and Sassoon was clearly expressing a good deal of ambivalence (sitting on the fence if I am being cynical). The final chapters of this, the first of his trilogy, set in the Somme, are in sharp contrast to his idyllic, carefree youth.

Original publisher's white cloth with black lettering, and red and black decorations, in pictorial dustwrapper. He jumped the hurdles of expressing his attraction for men without overtly writing about his homosexuality, obviously for fear of insulting norms and risk of imprisonment back then.His family left him a small legacy that allows him to drift through life without working for a living. For the first days of the Somme, he was in reserve opposite Fricourt, watching the slaughter from a ridge. It won both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, being immediately recognised as a classic of English literature.

First Edition thus, on laid paper, free endpapers lightly browned as often; original blue buckram, gilt backs, gilt tops, uncut, backstrips lightly sunned (but all gilt wholly bright and legible), a very good, bright, clean set. His writing is crisp and tinged by nostalgia, the humor is subtle and he paints beautiful pictures of a world about be be torn apart by war and the modernity of the 20th century. Nowadays these same picturesque little villages are more likely to hold bankers on weekend retreats, adulterous retirees, and women pulling in six figures selling gold lamé tea-towels on Etsy. Characters whom we have come to love die meaninglessly, and Sherston only can record the facts of it - he doesn't reflect on his grief at all, as though the awfulness of it utterly dulled his pen. Only ten years after the war ended, after some experience of journalism, did he feel ready to branch out into prose.Instead, Owen died, Graves started ploughing his own singular muse-obsessed furrow and Sassoon retreated into the past. He didn't grow up with a maiden aunt and his environment was more intellectual and cultural than he lets on.

His main concerns are cricket and fox hunting, and he is saved from seeming to be an utter upper class prig by virtue of his relatively shy nature and well-meaning intentions (not to mention his fairly impecuniary status compared to most other members of his social circle).Bright and clean copies throughout in fine recent leather bindings of full dark blue morocco, the spines with five raised bands, compartments ruled, decorated and lettered in gilt.