Adam Hochschild‘s book To End All Wars: A Story of the Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914 – 1918 was the major inspiration for ‘The World is My Country’. We were therefore delighted that Adam was able to help us launch the project with this talk at Friends House in London on 17 January 2014.
Lion tamers and agents provacateurs
The only recent account of the First World War to foreground the war’s opponents, To End All Wars has a ‘cast of characters … more revealing than any but the greatest novelists could invent’, including ‘generals, trade unionists, feminists, agents provocateurs, a writer turned propagandist, a lion tamer turned revolutionary, a cabinet minister, a crusading working-class journalist, three soldiers brought before a firing squad at dawn, and a young idealist from the Midlands who, long after his struggle against the war was over, would be murdered by the Soviet secret police.’
Police raids and buried documents
Featuring the well-known (Bertrand Russell, Rudyard Kipling) and the little-known (Violet Tillard, John S. Clarke), the war’s opponents (Emily Hobhouse, Charlotte Despard) and its staunchest advocates (Sir Alfred Milner, John Buchan), this is a story of a story of police raids and buried documents, of the gleeful, even mischievous, appropriation of a pompous prosecutor’s words to be used as anti-war propaganda, and of a Commander-in-Chief (John French, 1st Earl of Ypres) whose sister (Charlotte Despard) was a defiant revolutionary and co-founder of the Women’s Peace Crusade.
To End All Wars won the 2012 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Please contact us if you’d like to invite Emily and Gabriel to come and speak to your group later this year: 0207 278 3344 or promos [at] peacenews.info.
You can purchase a copy of To End All Wars through Housmans Bookshop.
