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1919 saw the publication of two major polemical works: The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes and Democratic Ideals and Reality by Halford J. Mackinder. The former is famous, the latter much less so - but it was its own way a prophetic book. Mackinder's message, his warning - addressed to the peacemakers at Versailles - was memorably summarized thus: 'Who Rules East Europe commands the Heartland: / Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: / Who rules the World-Island commands the World.' Mackinder contended that power was shifting from the sea-borne empires to countries that encompassed the great land masses: Eastern Europe he designated as 'the geographical pivot of history.' His thesis made a notable impression on German geopolitician Karl Haushofer who was keenly read, in turn, by Hitler. But Democratic Ideals and Reality has endured as a critical study of imperial ambitions and geographical realities.

The sub-title is important: The History of a Small Town and an Extinguished World. The small town is Bransk, in eastern Poland. Before World War II, Bransk was a shtetl whose population was equally divided between Poles and Jews. Today there are no Jews.In Shtetl, Eva Hoffman reconstructs the lost world of East European Jewry She explores the rich culture and institutions of Polish Jews, and looks at the forms of multicultural coexistence during several centuries, the shades of prejudice and tolerance and the phases of conflict and comity. By probing the deep ambivalence that coloured relations between Poles and Jews on the eve of World War II, Shtetl throws new light on motives which influenced Christian villagers' decisions to rescue or betray their Jewish neighbours when the Nazis invaded.'Charting the ebbs and flows of repression and tolerance, uprisings and occupation, migration and assimilation of Poland's history, Shtetl provides a rare and valuable analysis of the troubled relationship between Poles and Jews over the centuries. For the Jews, Poland is the symbol of murder where the Nazis set up their killing fields and where the Polish post-war response was further brutality, followed by amnesia: for the Poles, there remains a feeling of unfairness that their own wartime sufferings are overlooked. Hoffman's interest lies in rescuing the past from the evasions, concealments and half-truths demanded by post-war politics and national pride - as well as from the additions of the imagination, which all memory to some extent invokes.' Caroline Moorehead, Daily Telegraph 'A luminous and deeply engrossing social history' Lisa Appignanesi, Independent'This is a subtle, fair, scrupuously even-handed piece of work. It begs moral questions of us all ... Hoffman gives no answers, but she asks the questions, and observes the moral hazards with a rare sensitivity.' Julia Neuberger, Irish Times

'An enthralling collection of essays on personalties and events of the interwar years, taking in Amy Johnson's solo flights, the Jarrow marches, Lawrence of Arabia, Soho corruption, the Rector of Stiffkey and the Brighton Trunk Murders.' John Walsh, The OldieIn this brilliant reconstruction of life in England between the two world wars, Ronald Blythe highlights a number of key episodes and personalities which typify the flavour of those two extraordinary decades. He begins with the burial in Westminster Abbey of the Unknown Soldier. This was nearly two years after the last shot had been fired in battle and the near-delirium of 1919 - a boom year though few families were out of mourning - was giving way to the uneasy realization that the world was still far from being a place fit for heroes to live in.The period abounded with colourful figures whose idiosyncrasies Ronald Blythe relishes. The absurd Joynson-Hicks cleaning up London's morals while defending General Dyer shooting down nearly 400 Indians at Amritsar; Mrs Meyrick, the night-club queen of London, being regularly raided at the famous '43'; John Reith putting the B. B.C. on its feet and the public in its place; and headline stealers such as Amy Johnson and T. E. Lawrence.Behind this garish facade, the author shows the new writers emerging at the turn of the decade from their embarrassingly middle-class backgrounds and traces the birth of Britain's first radical intelligentsia. The popular front, the cartoonist David Low's Colonel Blimp and the Left Book Club characterise the much-changed political climate of the 1930s. There, dealing with Jarrow, the Spanish Civil War and Munich, Ronald Blythe show his capacity for writing with an urgency no less effective for its restraint. Coupled with the delightful astringency he brings to such rather less weighty matters as the Brighton trunk murders and the Rector of Stiffkey's remarkable capers, Ronald Blythe demonstrated in this early book his impressive gifts as a social historian.

Jean Genet's The Balcony, which premiered in 1957, is acknowledged as one of the founding plays of modern theatre: philosopher Lucien Goldmann dubbed it 'the first great Brechtian play in French literature'.In a brothel of an unnamed French city the madam, Irma, directs a series of fantastical scenarios - a bishop forgives a penitent, a judge punishes a thief, a general rides astride his horse. Outside, an uprising threatens to engulf the streets. The patrons of the brothel wait anxiously for the chief of police to arrive, but in his place comes the queen's envoy to inform the assembled that the figureheads of the establishment have been killed in the uprising. Play-acting turns to reality as the patrons don their costumes in public in an attempt to quell the insurrection.Illusion and reality, order and dissolution - these are the grand themes of The Balcony.

The Screens was the last of Genet's plays to be performed during his lifetime. Its subject is the Algerian War of Independence, and it is an intricately crafted, grandiose construction - beguiling and baffling in equal measure.While the most openly political of Genet's plays, the work is not revolutionary in intent. Rather, as the play progresses the radical direction of lighting and the use of folding canvases serve to segment and compartmentalise the drama, and in so doing they transform the extremities of war into a series of incantatory scenes, vital and ritualistic, that bring stability to an otherwise unbearable reality.'The greatness of [The Screens], in all its lurid and unremitting, often comic theatricality, is its deliberate and logical dismantling not just of French identity-France as empire, as power, as history-but of the very notion of identity itself.' Edward Said, Grand Street

Anne Karpf's parents survived the Nazi Holocaust. Her mother, a concert pianist when she was eighteen, was a survivor of Plaszow and Auschwitz concentrations camps. Her father survived several Russian labour camps. When they came to Britain in 1947, their pasts came with them.In this thought-provoking and moving memoir, Anne Karpf explores the profound impact of her parents' wartime experiences on her daily life. Combining a gripping account of her parents' survival, a sharp examination of the history of British attitudes to Jews and to the Holocaust, and turning an often wryly comic eye on the parent-child struggle, The War After is a fascinating and deeply touching story.When originally published in 1996 it was widely acclaimed:'Painful and honest.' Observer'Fascinating and revealing.' Literary Review 'Anne Karpf is a skilled storyteller, moving naturally between her own history and that of her parents in a way that neither intrudes nor distorts.' TLS'A vibrantly live memoir about growing up in a Holocaust home ... At times brutally sad, The War After is also a rich and funny exploration of the struggle between a child and her parents.' Independent on Sunday

Olivier Messiaen was one of the outstanding creative artists of his time. The strength of his appeal, to listeners as well as to composers, is a measure of the individuality of his music, which draws on a vast range of sources: rhythms of twentieth-century Europe and thirteenth-century India, ripe romantic harmony and brittle birdsong, the sounds of Indonesian percussion and modern electronic instruments. What binds all these together is, on one level, his unswerving devotion to praising God in his art, and on another, his independent view of how music is made. Messiaen's music offers a range of ways of experiencing time: time suspended in music of unparalleled changelessness, time racing in music of wild exuberance, time repeating itself in vast cycles of reiteration.In Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time, leading writer and musicologist, Paul Griffiths, explores the problems of religious art, and includes searching analyses and discussions of all the major works, suggesting how they function as works of art and not only as theological symbols. This comprehensive and stimulating book covers the whole of Messiaen's output up to and including his opera, Saint Françoise d'Assise.

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky is the first of the celebrated series of conversation books in which Stravinsky, prompted by Robert Craft, reviewed his long and remarkable life. The composer brings the Imperial Russia of his childhood vividly into focus, at the same time scanning what were at the time the brave new horizons of Boulez and Stockhausen with extraordinary acuity.Stravinsky answers searching questions about his musical development and recalls his association with Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet. There are sympathetic and extraordinarily illuminating reminiscences of such composers as Debussy and Ravel ('the only musicians who immediately understood Le Sacre du Printemps'), while mischievous squibs are directed at others, most notably perhaps against Richard Strauss, all of whose operas Stravinsky wished 'to admit ... to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant banality'.The conversations are by no means confined to musical subjects, ranging uninhibitedly across all the arts: Stravinsky gives unforgettable sketches of Ibsen, Rodin, Proust, Giacometti, Dylan Thomas and T S Eliot.'The conversations between Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft are unique in musical history. The penetration of Craft's questions and the patience and detail of Stravinsky's answers combine to produce an intimate picture of a man who has sometimes puzzled, often delighted, and always intrigued ...' The Sunday Times

The main protagonist of Men Like Gods is Mr Barnstaple, a careful driver and depressive journalist writing for The Liberal newspaper. It is to his consternation, therefore, that while carefully motoring along the Maidenhead road he skids on a bend and finds himself in another world altogether - in short, a supposed Utopia. This Utopia has its own socialist government and is very similar to the Earth. However, as pathogens have been eliminated the newly arrived visitors from Earth pose a grave threat to the Utopians by compromising their already weak immune systems. The people from earth find themselves being quarantined until a solution to this problem can be found. As no progress is being made many begin to resent this isolation and before long some plot to take over Utopia. Mr Barnstaple finds himself a total outsider, both with the Utopians and his fellow earthlings, and escapes from the quarantine castle just as the Earthlings' revolt begins. How can he survive in this Utopia and how can he get back to his Earth?Men Like Gods was first published in 1923.

On the 28th May, 1943, the author of this book was parachuted, together with Captain Stuart and a small party, to the highlands of Montenegro. These two officers commanded the first British military mission to Tito's headquarters. They landed unawares in the middle of the most critical Axis operation as yet mounted against the Yogoslav partisan movement, whose main forces of four divisions, lightly armed and burdened with three thousand wounded, were encircled on the 'Embattled Mountain' of Durmitor - the symbol of this book - by double their number, headed by German mountain and SS troops, supported by artillery and aircraft. This account of the breaking of the enemy ring is a classic study in partisan war.'The republication of The Embattled Mountain is both welcome and timely. It is welcome because this remains, four decades on, a compelling and important book. It is not only a classic war memoir in the inimitable British tradition - alternately exciting, moving, funny, understated and poetic - but it is also an important historical study of ant-Axis resistance in Yugoslavia during the Second World War and of Britain's engagement with and changing policies towards that resistance.' Mark Wheeler, Professor of History and International Relations at the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology

The real-life tale behind Netflix's Empress Sisi and the Anarchist, whose assassination in 1898 shocked the world.Empress Elisabeth of Austria, known to her family as 'Sisi', belongs to a famous love story of European royalty. In 1853 the Emperor Franz Josef, the most eligible bachelor in Europe, fell in love with her at first sight when she was 15. They were married the next year. On the surface, it was a fairy-tale marriage, all the more poignant, with hindsight, because her tragic death augured the twilight years of the Habsburg Empire.First published in 1988, Brigitte Hamann's definitive biography tells Elisabeth's story from her birth into Bavarian nobility to her assassination at the hands of an Italian anarchist. In her lifetime she was idolised solely for her grace and beauty; but Hamann shows us a stronger character, bitter at her marriage, seeking independence, and struggling against the powerful influence of her mother-in-law, the Archduchess Sophie.

Walter de la Mare's anthologies are in a category of their own, indeed, they are of such excellence as to make the description belittling. Walter de la Mare compiled five of them, with commentaries, using poems and passages of prose. All are being reissued in Faber Finds, and to each he brought such a range of reading, wisdom and intelligence as to make them cornucopias of delight and entertainment. Behold, This Dreamer was first published in 1939 and Faber Finds is proud to reissue it seventy years on. Walter de la Mare provides a long introduction which leads to, in his own words, '. . . a Survey - a panorama - of a wide theme, endlessly inviting, in much obscure, viewed from many different angles, by many diverse minds.' To quote from the original blurb, 'Mr de la Mare is concerned not merely with dreaming, whether by night or day, with fantasies, hallucinations, explanations and interpretations of dreams, and the whole business (so to speak) of getting into (as well as out of) the dreamstate. His net is thrown over death as well as sleep, Nature as well as Man: and he takes his soundings in those unconscious and unreasoning depths out of which human personality and art so mysteriously spring.'

Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) was an exceptional woman in an age rich in strong personalities. Best known for her opera The Wreckers, her music, long neglected, is gradually winning new friends. A feminist, intrepid traveller and sportswoman, she wrote nine volumes of autobiography, vividly recounting a life packed with incident.Aged nineteen, in the face of fierce opposition from her father, she went to Germany to study and 'plunged joyfully into the dear old sea of German music which surged about the feet of Brahms', befriending Schumann's widow, Clara, and the composer Heinrich von Herzogenberg and his wife, Lisl, the first of many women to whom Ethel was passionately attached.Her writings, abridged by Ronald Crichton, and including a catalogue of her music, are full of brilliant portraits - Brahms, Mahler, Beecham, Emmeline Pankhurst and Queen Victoria - all described in uncompromising detail. Numerous anecdotes range from hurling a brick through a cabinet minister's window, resulting in two months in Holloway prison - where she was observed, leaning through the bars, conducting her March of the Women with a toothbrush - to an Egyptian visit where she sought out a hermaphrodite in order to make an anatomical examination.

Brilliantly compiled and presented by the celebrated biographer, Hilary Spurling, Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book has become a classic in the history of English cooking, and an extraordinarily intimate glimpse into the fabric of everyday Elizabethan life.'Hilary Spurling has done brilliantly ... Being both a scholar and a cook seems to be a rare combination than one might have expected.' Jane Grigson'Few cookery books are as important or as fascinating as this ... (Hilary Spurling's) scholarly and practical skills combined make the book much more than an antiquarian curiosity. It is a cookery book to use.' Victoria Glendinning, The Times'Hilary Spurling's research into Lady Fettiplace's family and background is stunning. She and her household do really come to life ... Hilary Spurling's pinpointing of her precise social standing and that of her intimates and acquaintances, of the kind of lives they led, consequently the kind of food they ate, the way it was prepared, preserved and so on, are all subjects of the greatest interest.' Elizabeth David

'It is a real cause for celebration when the best and most subtle literary biography of our time comes back into print, and in a single volume instead of the original two. What Hilary Spurling does, in a beautifully-written book, is to relate the life [of Ivy Compton-Burnett] intimately to the work and show in fascinating details, and with wonderful perception, how her subject's characters mirror aspects of her own nature. The book sends one back to read or re-read the novels - unfashionable, toweringly original tragic-comedies - the most individual novels, it may be, of our time.' The Good Book Guide'Atrue classic of the genre.' The Times'A biographical triumph ... Hilary Spurling's portrait - elegant, stylist, witty, tender, immensely acute -dazzles and exhilarates.' Literary Review

Jaroslav Hasek was the author of The Good Soldier Svejk, a twentieth-century masterpiece, and one of the funniest novels ever written. He was also, to quote Sir Cecil Parrott, a 'truant, rebel, vagabond, anarchist, play-actor, practical joker, bohemian (and Bohemian), alcoholic, traitor to the Czech legion, Bolshevik and bigamist.': in short a Bad Bohemian.Hasek's bottle-strewn life, as Sir Cecil makes clear, was the raw material of his fiction; this remarkable biography, the only one in the English language, makes for riotous reading. Sir Cecil Parrott as well as being the British Ambassador to Czechoslovakia in the 1960s was also the translator of The Good Soldier Svejk (his translation is definitive) and leading authority on Jaroslav Hasek.'Sir Cecil coolly untangles Hasek from the coils of rumour, and manages, while performing this delicate scholarly operation, to transmit the raucous glitter of the beer-gardens and night-dives and cafés-chantants which were Hasek's element. The result is a triumph, and - like all first-rate scholarship - enormously enjoyable.' Sunday Times

The Story of My Heart, first published in 1883, is one of the stranger autobiographies in the English language. It describes almost nothing about the writer's life, education, family or work. Opening with a mystical experience on a green hill in the south of England seventeen years before - the date is exact, in a book that is otherwise so exalted above mere facts - it is the record of the author's striving for 'soul-life', for communion with the beauty of nature. In impassioned prose, with echoes of Blake and Shelley, Jefferies relates the history of his feeling of identification with the sun, wind, space and the pulse of natural life. The book is a prayer to the physical world, a pantheistic rejection of modern urban life and technique: 'the sun was stronger than science; the hills more than philosophy'. Some of the most striking passages in The Story of My Heart are descriptions of the controlled chaos of London, which represented for Jefferies the vortex of modern modern human life, a force that is 'driving, pushing, carried on in a stress of feverish force like a bullet'. A neglected classic of English nature writing, The Story of My Heart speaks to today's ecological concerns in the language of another era.

'[The Brideshead Generation] has both style and substance, and is above all an enjoyable companion. It has a wildly amusing cast, here controlled by a skilful director.' Evening Standard'Jovial and entertaining, full of the sort of stories that your friends will tell you if you don't read it before them.' Independent'Carpenter has read widely and has collected an enormous fund of entertaining stories and facts.' Sunday Telegraph'Hauntingly sad and wonderfully funny and by far the best thing Humphrey Carpenter has done.' Fiona MacCarthy, The Times

Those who have read Williams's earlier novels will not want to be told anything about Descent into Hell except that it is one of his best. Those who do not know the author's work will find that when they have read this novel, they will want to read all the others. Highly acclaimed writer of the thriller with a supernatural element, Williams's novels can be read for pure excitement. However, there is also a comedy of manners and acute analysis of human relationships, and finally, exploration of abysses of beauty and horror beyond the borders of the material world. This book, as the title may suggest, is not recommended reading for hyper-sensitive people alone at night in an empty house.

First published in 1959 The Centre of the Green is John Bowen's third novel. The story centres around the Baker family: the father Justin is a retired Colonel; the mother, Teresa, is over-possessive and refuses to admit that her sons have grown-up; the sons Julian and Charles - one is a married advertising copywriter with a penchant for extra-marital affairs while the other is withdrawn and suicidal, desperately looking for human contact in the vast anonymity of London.It is Julian's involvement with a seventeen-year-old girl that sparks the chain of events that eventually encompasses the whole family. The scene shifts between Devonshire, London and Majorca as each member of the family searches for a resolution to the impasse into which they have drifted and struggle to regain the family ties that they once had. A subtle, intelligent and compassionate novel The Centre of the Green was commended by the Observer for its 'admirable vitality', while the Spectator described it as 'a series of expertly managed shocks'.

Set in the world of a large advertising company Storyboard focuses on the decision by the agency's clients, Hoppness, Silch & Co. ('the soap people') to destroy one of their competitor's products. Into this scheme are thrust copyeditor Sophia Last and her boss Hugh Grover, as well as over-conscientious Account Executive Keith Bates, his wife Sylvia and their son Stephen. Also caught up in these events is Ralph Cavell, a young research graduate turned journalist. Storyboard is not primarily a novel about advertising. It is an exploration of how people can be corrupted, and ultimately destroyed, by their desire for money and power and how even those people who start out with good intentions can be misled from their original purpose. It is also a critique of powerful corporations that are controlled and organised by the greed of those who operate them.An absorbing and adult novel, Storyboard cemented John Bowen's reputation as a mature and intelligent novelist when it was first published in 1960.

Alexander Herzen's own brilliance and the extraordinary circumstances of his life combine to place his memoirs among the great testimonies of the modern era. Born in 1812, the illegitimate son of a wealthy Russian landowner, he became one of the most important revolutionary and intellectual figures of his time - as theorist, polemicist and political actor; and fifty years after his death Lenin pronounced him 'the father of Russian socialism'. My Past and Thoughts uniquely assimilates the personal to the historical, and is both a classic of autobiography an an unparalleled record of his century's remarkable life. His account of a privileged childhood among the Russian aristocracy is illuminated with the insight of a great novelist; his friends and enemies - Marx, Wagner, Mill, Bakunin, Garibaldi, Kropotkin - are brought brilliantly to life; and as a sceptical and free-thinking observer, he unerringly traces the line of revolutionary development, from the earliest stirrings of Russian radicalism through the tumultuous ideological debates of the International. 'His power of observation is extraordinary. He tells a story with the economy of a great reporter. His gift is for knowing not only what people are, but how they are historically situated. Somewhere in the pages of this hard, honest observer of what movements do to men, we shall find ourselves.' - V.S. Pritchett

'A wonderfully vivid portrait of a remarkable man and an amazing age.' ScotsmanSoldier, explorer, scholar and ambitious courtier in the shark-pool of Elizabethan politics, Sir Walter Raleigh is the epitome of the English Renaissance man.Yet to many of his day he was an arrogant liar, who deserved every one of his thirteen years in the Tower of London. To a vain and ageing Queen, he was the betrayer of her affections. And to the Spanish, he was the most hated of pirates. Was Sir Walter Raleigh a hero - or a deceiver, terrorist and ruthless adventurer? What caused his rising star to fall so dramatically, ending with his execution in 1618? And what was the truth behind his tempestuous relationship with Elizabeth, 'dear Empress of my heart'? Raleigh Trevelyan reveals the truth in this gripping portrait of one of the most charismatic, romantic and misunderstood figures of the Elizabethan age.'Compelling ... an absorbing investigation into Raleigh's life.' Guardian'A stirring account of an intriguing character.' Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times, Books of the Year'Engrossing ... a monumental tribute to one of our best-loved national heroes.' Literary Review

Adrian Bell (1901-1980) was born in Lancashire and grew up in London but wished for a life in the open air. In 1920 he apprenticed himself to a West Suffolk farmer, an experience that would inspire him to farm on his own. His celebrated trilogy Corduroy (1930), Silver Ley (1931) and The Cherry Tree (1932) grew out of that same raw material.The Cherry Tree (1932) finds Bell back at the helm of the Silver Ley farm whose running he took over in the second panel of the trilogy. The farming business remains in a parlous state beset by high costs, and Bell is forced to scale back his ambitions for crop-growing while continuing to breed cattle and horses. But perhaps the greatest upheaval the book describes is the tale of how he 'wearied of solitude and married a wife.'

Adrian Bell (1901-1980) was born in Lancashire and grew up in London but wished for a life in the open air. In 1920 he apprenticed himself to a West Suffolk farmer, an experience that would inspire him to farm on his own. His celebrated trilogy Corduroy (1930), Silver Ley (1931) and The Cherry Tree (1932) grew out of that same raw material, and Corduroy (reissued here with an introduction by his son, the journalist Martin Bell) remains his most admired work.'There is a vitality and freshness of manner about this modern pastoral which carries one easily along through a pleasant maze of turnips, mangolds, and the yearly routine of a Suffolk farm. As the seasons change and the crops come and go, the green young apprentice is gradually initiated into the mysteries of coaxing a hazardous living from the soil.' Spectator

Adrian Bell (1901-1980) was born in Lancashire and grew up in London but wished for a life in the open air. In 1920 he apprenticed himself to a West Suffolk farmer, an experience that would inspire him to farm on his own. His celebrated trilogy Corduroy (1930), Silver Ley (1931) and The Cherry Tree (1932) grew out of that same raw material.Silver Ley takes up at the conclusion of Bell's apprenticeship, whereupon he persuaded his parents to acquire a nearby farm of 50 acres where he could into practice what he had learned of farming. However Bell was living through straitened post-war times that presented a challenge to even the most seasoned agricultural hands, and he had to endure seven lean years, though his commitment to the task he set himself never dimmed.

Foreign Mud is one of the most distinguished of Maurice Collis' works of history. This account of the struggle between the British and Chinese in the Opium War in Canton in the 1830s has a vividness that comes from 20 years of experience in the Far East as a civil servant.'The story of the Opium War does not lend itself to natural composition; it violates all the established rules of dramatric art; it does not begin at the right moment and it prolongs its end long after the climax has been reached. Collis has handled this intraceable material with surety of touch . . . The result is a self-contained narrative, lucid, balanced and creating a untiy of impression . . . so lucid, so human, so amusing, and so fair.' Daily Telegraph

Foremost among the biographies that Maurice Collis wrote during his wide-ranging literary career is Siamese White - an account of the career of Samuel White of Bath who, during the reign of James II, was appointed by the King of Siam as a mandarin of that country. The book superbly embodies that old adage - truth is stranger than fiction.'A magnificent story, full of interest and excitement, but there is more to it than that. Collis, who has lived for years on the scene of these high happenings, is able to give us a first-hand picture of a fascinating land: of a lovely archipelago, of rivers and rapids, of an immemorial track through jungles haunted by tigers and malaria.' Evening Standard

"This is an unpretentious book, but it brings out with unusual clearness the dilemma that faces every official in an empire like our own." George OrwellTRIALS IN BURMA recounts Maurice Collis' experiences as a district magistrate in Rangoon in the late 1920s. The book recounts his gradual realisation that far from administering an impartial system of justice, he is expected to protect British interests. Wriiten in a cool dispassionate style, Collis describes how - be choosing integrity over career, he eventually loses his job."A brilliant, direct and extraordinarily vivid account of this troubled period...a masterly survey of the Burmese scene." Daily Mail