The horrors and tragedies of the First World War produced some of the finest literature of the century: including Memoirs of an Infantry Officer; Goodbye to All That; the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas; and the novels of Ford Madox Ford. Collectively detailing every campaign and action, together with the emotions and motives of the men on the ground, these 'war books' are the most important set of sources on the Great War that we have. Through looking at the war poems, memoirs and accounts published after the First World War, Ian Andrew Isherwood addresses the key issues of wartime historiography-patriotism, cowardice, publishers and their motives, readers and their motives, masculinity and propaganda. He also analyses the culture, society and politics of the world left behind. Remembering the Great War is a valuable, fascinating and stirring addition to our knowledge of the experiences of WWI.

On October 11th, 1899 long-simmering tensions between Britain and the Boer Republics - the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic - finally erupted into the conflict that would become known as the Second Boer War. Two days after the first shots were fired, a young writer by the name of Winston Churchill set out for South Africa to cover the conflict for the Morning Post. The Boer War brings together the two collections of despatches that Churchill published on the conflict. London to Ladysmith recounts the future Prime Minister's arrival in South Africa and his subsequent capture by and dramatic escape from the Boers, the adventure that first brought the name of Winston Churchill to public attention. Ian Hamilton's March collects Churchill's later despatches as he marched alongside a column of the main British army from Bloemfontein to Pretoria. Published together, these books are a vivid eye-witness account of a landmark period in British Imperial History and an insightful chronicle of a formative experience by Britain's greatest war-time leader.

This work addresses a central but often ignored question in the history of modern France and modern colonialism: how did the Third Republic, highly regarded for its professed democratic values, allow itself to be seduced by the insidious and persistent appeal of a civilizing ideology with distinct racist overtones? By focusing on a particular group of colonial officials in a specific setting the governors general of French West Africa from 1895 to 1930 the author argues that the ideal of a special civilizing mission had a decisive impact on colonial policymaking and on the evolution of modern French republicanism generally. French ideas of civilization simultaneously republican, racist, and modern encouraged the governors general in the 1890 s to attack such feudal African institutions as aristocratic rule and slavery in ways that referred back to France s own experience of revolutionary change. Ironically, local administrators in the 1920 s also invoked these same ideas to justify such reactionary policies as the reintroduction of forced labor, arguing that coercion, which inculcated a work ethic in the lazy African, legitimized his loss of freedom. By constantly invoking the ideas of civilization, colonial policy makers in Dakar and Paris managed to obscure the fundamental contradictions between the rights of man guaranteed in a republican democracy and the forcible acquisition of an empire that violates those rights.