Siegfried Sassoon – författare

The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston includes Sherston's Progress and both Memoirs,

William Collins Books and Decca Records are proud to present ARGO Classics, a historic catalogue of classic fiction read by some of the world’s most renowned voices. Originally released as vinyl records, these expertly abridged and remastered stories are now available to download for the first time.A collection of the greatest war poetry ever written, read by some of the 20th century’s most renowned actors.Tragedy, war, and humanity are played out in these timeless readings of poetry written about, or on, the battlefield.Performed by Sir John Gielgud; Peter Orr; Gwen Watford; and David King.This collection includes poems from:• Thomas Hardy• WB Yeats• Wilfred Owen• Siegfried Sassoon• Ted Hughes• Edward Shanks• Robert Nicholls• WN Hodgson• Patrick Mac Gill• Julian Grenfell• Edmund Blunden• Edgell Rickword• David Jones• Robert Graves• E A Mackintosh• Edward Thomas• Isaac Rosenberg• Rupert Brooke• Ivor Gurney• CH Sorley• John Masefield• Edward Lucie-Smith• Willougby Weaving• John McRae• IA Williams• David Gascoyne• Henry Reed• C Day Lewis• Stephen Spender• Dylan Thomas• Louis Max Niece• Alan Ross• Sidney Keyes• Ruthven Todd• Michael Roberts• John Betjeman• Alun Lewis• Roy Fuller• Charles Causley• Keith Douglas• Herbert Read• Patric Dickinson• Hugh MacDiarmid

William Collins Books and Decca Records are proud to present ARGO Classics, a historic catalogue of classic fiction read by some of the world’s most renowned voices. Originally released as vinyl records, these expertly abridged and remastered stories are now available to download for the first time.A collection of the greatest poetry from the Romantic period, the battlefield, and the Victorian era, read by some of the 20th century’s most renowned actors.Themes of war, love, nature, sexuality, and much more are played out in these timeless readings of poetry from the 19th and 20th century.Performed by Sir John Gielgud; Richard Burton; William Squire; Richard Marquand; Peggy Ashcroft; Margaretta Scott; Tony Church; Derek Godfrey; Patrick Garland; Gary Watson; Margaretta Scott; and Janette Richer; Gwen Watford; and David King.This collection includes poems from:• William Wordsworth• Samuel Taylor Coleridge• William Blake• Thomas Hardy• WB Yeats• Robert Browning• Lord Alfred Tennyson• Christina Rossetti• Lord Byron• Wilfred Owen• Siegfried Sassoon• Percy Bysshe Shelley• John Keats• Gerard Manley Hopkins• Dante Gabriel Rossetti• Ted Hughes

At the dawn of World War I, Siegfried Sassoon exchanged his pursuits of cricket, fox-hunting, and romantic verse for army life amid the muddy trenches of France. The first English soldier-poet to achieve notoriety as an opponent of the war, he ranks among the conflict's most critical poetic voices. This collection of his epigrammatic and satirical poetry conveys the shocking brutality and pointlessness of the Great War. Many of these poems were written in the hospital while Sassoon recovered from wounds he received in battle. Their violence and graphic detail shocked readers, impressing upon them the horrors of trench warfare and the foot soldier's weariness of the never-ending struggle. "The dynamic quality of his war poems," observed the Times Literary Supplement, "was due to the intensity of feeling which underlay their cynicism." More than 80 of Sassoon's moving works are featured in this volume, including "Counter-Attack," "They," "The General," and "Base Details."

'It is my own story I am trying to tell, and as such it must be received; those who expect a universalization of the Great War must look for it elsewhere.'Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, first published in 1930, is Siegfried Sassoon's fictionalized autobiography of the period between the early spring of 1916 and the summer of 1917. The narrative moves from the trenches to the Fourth Army School, to Morlancourt and a raid, then to and through the Somme. The mind of the narrator turns from unquestioning acceptance of the war and of the standards which it set up, to doubting the necessity of the seemingly endless slaughter.

George Sherston develops from a shy and awkward child, through shiftless adolescence, to an officer just beginning to understand the horrors of trench warfare. The world he grows up in, of village cricket and loyal grooms, had vanished forever by the time Sassoon wrote this book, but he captures it with a lyricism and gentleness that defy nostalgia.A bestseller on publication in 1928, this superb evocation of the Edwardian age has remained in print ever since. It was the first volume of a classic trilogy, completed by Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston's Progress, that charted both the destruction of the world for which Sassoon fought, and his own emergence as one of Britain's finest war poets.

Sassoon's fame as a novelist and autobiographer, and the success of his posthumously published Diaries, have somewhat obscured his achievement as a poet. Apart from the famousWar Poemsof 1919, which firmly established his reputation, he published eight volumes of verse during his lifetime. This collected edition represents his own choice of the poems he wished to preserve. It was first published in 1947 and subsequently enlarged to include the late poems in Sequences.

Siegfried Sassoon is one of the First World War poets whose poetry has defined a generation. He published most of his war poetry in The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918). Chronologically ordered, the poems in this collection act as a timeline for the war, bringing to life the extraordinary experiences of soldiers in that conflict.

I can hear the creak of the saddle and the clop and clink of hoofs as we cross the bridge over the brook by Dundell Farm; there is a light burning in the farmhouse window, and the evening star glitters above a broken drift of half-luminous cloud. It is with a sigh that I remember simple moments such as those, when I understood so little of the deepening sadness of life, and only the strangeness of the spring was knocking at my heart.In the 1920s, a young man, grappling with the horrors of the war from which he had just returned, decided to write about a happier time. A time of cricket matches and fox-hunting, the busyness of village life and the shyness of youth.That man was Siegfried Sassoon, and this is his book. Originally published anonymously, it went on to become Faber & Faber's first bestseller. A classic depiction of pre-First World War Britain, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man tells two mirrored stories, about a boy coming of age and a country losing its innocence.

As I stepped over one of the Germans an impulse made me lift him up from the miserable ditch. Propped against the bank, his blond face undisfigured, except by the mud which I wiped from his eyes and mouth with my coat sleeve. He'd evidently been killed while digging, for his tunic was knotted loosely about his shoulders. He didn't look to be more than eighteen. Hoisting him a little higher, I thought what a gentle face he had, and remembered that this was the first time I'd ever touched one of our enemies with my hands. Perhaps I had some dim sense of the futility which had put an end to this good-looking youth. Anyhow I hadn't expected the Battle of the Somme to be quite like this.This first-hand account of the face of battle is as beautifully written as it is historically significant.