"Murray is the best kind of literary biographer" – The Financial Times.
For more information about the books of Nicholas Murray
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Winner of the 2015 Basil Bunting Award for poetry

Thursday 12 July 2012

Please Mention the War

The paperback of my book about the British poets of the First World War, The Red Sweet Wine of Youth, is published at the end of the month and you can order it now (the Amazon link is here to the right of this page if you prefer to buy it that way).  I hope it's a concise and useful account of a dozen of the main poets and the literary background from which they emerged.  Like many British schoolkids I was brought up on Owen & Co and poems like his "Dulce et Decorum Est" which, we were told, expressed "the horrors of war".  They certainly did that and the horrors of the trenches need no embellishment but I try in the book to give what I hope is a little more nuanced view of the poets' attitude to war and in particular I try to represent Sassoon's protest against the war in what I also hope is a more accurate way than it is often represented.  I hope you enjoy the book.

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