Martin Boyd: A Life

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Martin Boyd was one of the generation whose lives were changed by World War I. He served in a British regiment, survived the trenches in 1916-17 and joined the Royal Flying Corps. The pacifist beliefs which emerged from that war experience are central to his fiction, as they were to his life. Boyd's was a complex personality: witty, generous, sociable yet deeply reserved. He looked for his 'home of the spirit' in many places: an Anglican monastery, London's West End clubland, a Cambridge village, and an old famly house in Harkaway, Victoria, and among English expatriates in Rome. In a fine study of a man and his work, Brenda Niall re-creates the Melbourne in which Boyd grew up, just before World War I, and traces his development as a writer during his restless expatriate years.

Author Bio

One of Australia's best-known writers Brenda Niall is the author of four award-winning biographies. She has an AO for services to Australian literature, and an honorary D.Litt. from Monash as well as degrees from the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University and Monash University. As Reader in English at Monash University, she gave courses on Australian literature, American literature, biography and autobiography. She has held visiting fellowships at the University of Michigan, Yale University and the Australian National University; and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She now writes full-time, and is a frequent reviewer for the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Book Review.