Somerset Maugham's ode to the powerful forces behind creative genius. Charles Strickland is a staid banker, a man of wealth and privilege. He is also a man possessed of an unquenchable desire to create art. As Strickland pursues his artistic vision, he leaves London for Paris and Tahiti, and in his quest makes sacrifices that leave the lives of those closest to him in tatters. Through Maugham's sympathetic eye, Strickland's tortured and cruel soul becomes a symbol of the blessing and the curse of transcendent artistic genius, and the cost in humans' lives it sometimes demands.

    Barbellion has an extraordinary lust for life. As Zeppelins loomed above the streets of South Kensington, the humour and beauty he found in the world around him - in music, friendship, nature and love - deepens not just the tragedy of his own life, but the millions of lives lost during the First World War.

    Drifting between his club and the sights of London, he is drawn into the confidences of a secret agent in the thick of espionage. The agent is murdered in Hannay's apartment and Richard finds himself on the run from Scotland Yard and the cult of the 'Black stone.

    It brings a sort of sickening feeling to me even now, though I consider myself hardened to such sights.” Modest and unassuming, Feilding was a front line soldier in World War One, and a leader of men, preferring to volunteer for a dangerous duty rather than an order a subordinate to do so in his place. With a narrative broken only by the months he spent recuperating from wounds, Feilding was blessed with an extraordinary luck: his survival was a mystery even to his comrades. Vivid yet unexaggerated in its depiction of life at the front, Feilding’s letters are driven by his thoughts, emotions and experiences of the war, and of home. “…it was nice to think that at last, after all the years of war, these men were getting some personal and first-hand recognition from their fellow-countrymen.” Written with the events still fresh in his mind, and often while still on the battlefield or in the trenches, Feilding’s letters to his wife form one of the most compelling accounts of the Western Front during the First World War. Rowland Feilding (1871-1945) continued his family’s close association with the Coldstream Guards, transferring to the regiment from the City of London Yeomanry in 1915. In 1916 he took command of the 6th Connaught Rangers, and following its disbandment in 1918 the 1/15th Londons (Civil Service Rifles). They were demobilised the following year. Albion Press is an imprint of Endeavour Press, the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

    It is the property of Richard Vont, whose family has been tenants at Mandeleys for generations, and who refuses to go away without a fight.   Eighteen years ago, the marquis took an interest in Vont’s only daughter, bringing her under his wing and spiriting her across England and beyond. With his encouragement, Marcia has become a famous novelist, but her father was left alone and bitter. Now he has come up with a plan to avenge his loss and destroy the marquis once and for all.   As the plot unfolds, the righteousness of Vont’s anger is called into question, as is the loyalty of his American mercenary. But no matter how innocent the “wicked” marquis may turn out to be, it could already be too late to save his life.   This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

    is a passionate assertion of the futility of war' (the Spectator). Its author had been an actress and suffragette; after 1914 she worked at the Scottish Women's Hospital at Royaumont and organised Concerts at the Front. William - an Englishman was written in a tent within sound of guns and shells; this 'stunning... terrifically good' novel (Radio 4's A Good Read) is in one sense a very personal book, animated by fury and cynicism, and in another a detached one; yet is always 'profoundly moving' (Financial Times).In the view of Persephone Books, William is one of the greatest novels about war ever written: not the war of the fighting soldier or the woman waiting at home, but the war encountered by Mr and Mrs Everyman, wrenched away from their comfortable preoccupations - Socialism, Suffragettism, so gently mocked by Cicely Hamilton - and forced to be part of an almost dream-like horror (because they cannot at first believe what is happening to them). The scene when William and Griselda emerge after three idyllic weeks in a honeymoon cottage in the remote hills of the Belgian Ardennes, and encounter German brutality in a small village, is unforgettable. The book, which won the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse in 1919, is a masterpiece, written with an immediacy and a grim realism reminiscent of an old-fashioned, flickering newsreel.

    Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

    This book, originally written in 1919, was printed for the author and his friends, not for general publication. Lawrence abridged the original work and the present volume is about one-half the size of the original. Lawrence stated that if he was asked why he had abridged an unsatisfactory book instead of recasting it as a history, he would plead that to do so nice a job in the barracks which were his home since 1922 would need a degree of concentration amounting in an airman to moroseness; and an interest in the subject which was exhausted long ago in the actual experience of it.

    In 1915, he published The Elixir of Life, his only full length novel apart from the Swallows & Amazons series. He published Old Peter's Russian Tales, a collection of 21 folktales the following year. After the start of WWI, he became a foreign correspondent & covered the war on the Eastern Front for The Daily News. He also covered the Russian Revolutions of 1917, coming to sympathise with the Bolsheviks & becoming close to a number of its leaders, including Lenin & Trotsky. He met the woman who'd become his 2nd wife, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, who at that time was Trotsky's personal secretary. He provided some information to MI5, which gave him the code name S.76 in their files. Bruce Lockhart said in his memoirs: "Ransome was a Don Quixote with a walrus moustache, a sentimentalist who could always be relied upon to champion the underdog, & a visionary whose imagination had been fired by the revolution. He was on excellent terms with the Bolsheviks & frequently brought us information of the greatest value." In 10/19 he met Rex Leeper of the Foreign Office's Political Intelligence Dep't, who threatened to reveal this unless he privately submitted his articles & public speaking engagements for approval. Ransome's response was indignant. MI5 suspected he was a threat because of his opposition to the Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War. On one of his visits to the UK, authorities searched him & threatened arrest. In 10/19, as he was returning to Moscow on behalf of The Manchester Guardian, the Estonian foreign minister Ants Piip entrusted him to deliver a secret armistice proposal to the Bolsheviks. At that time the Estonians were fighting their War of Independence alongside White counterrevolutionary forces. After crossing the battlelines on foot, he passed the message, which to preserve secrecy had not been written down & depended for its authority only on the high regard in which he was held in both countries, to diplomat Maxim Litvinov in Moscow. To deliver the reply, which accepted Piip's conditions for peace, he had to return by the same means, but this time he had Evgenia with him. Estonia withdrew from the conflict & they settled in the capital.

    In a series of luminous sketches, Beerbohm captures the likes of Enoch Soames, only begetter of the neglected poetic masterwork Fungoids; Maltby and Braxton, two fashionable novelists caught in a bitter rivalry; and "Savonarola" Brown, author of a truly incredible tragedy encompassing the entire Italian Renaissance. One of the masterpieces of modern humorous writing, Seven Men is also a shrewdly perceptive, heartfelt homage to the wonderfully eccentric character of a bygone age.

    We cannot refer to ?the tradition? or to ?a tradition?; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is ?traditional? or even ?too traditional.? Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing arch?ological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of arch?ology. Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are ?more critical? than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet?s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity."