The Beauty and the Sorrow

Peter Englund is one of the finest writers of our time on the tactics, the killing and the psychology of war. In The Beauty and the Sorrow he superbly and humanely brings to life all the tragedy, chaos, death and gunsmoke of battle -- Simon Sebag Montefiore
A wonderfully wide and rich mosaic of personal experience from the First World War -- Antony Beevor
Extraordinary ... a work of magnificent, elegiac seriousness * Guardian *
A haunting mosaic of the experiences of war. The layers of voices build to create a richly complex and rarely heard account of the First World War that lingers in the memory long after the final page. Immensely powerful. -- Juliet Gardiner, author of 'The Blitz'
He conjures up the atmosphere over and over again with just a few stark words. I loved all the detail... inspiring. * Margaret Forster *
By turns pithy, lyrical, colourful, poignant and endlessly absorbing. An exquisite book. * Kirkus Reviews (starred) *
A brilliant feat of retrospective journalism * Publishers Weekly (starred) *
Intense and bighearted . . . Englund's volume joins an unconventional pantheon . . . The accounts of [these] lives can be terrifying or stirring, but are most fully alive in Englund's accumulation of small moments, stray details . . . His book has the most devastating ending I can remember in a piece of nonfiction. -- Dwight Garner * New York Times *
Like no other, this book brings out in a poignant and effective way the meaning of World War I for those who lived through it -- Prof Sir Lawrence Freedman