A Fox Under My Cloak

(Paperback, Main)

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The fifth volume of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, A Fox under My Cloak, is set in the Great War from the Christmas 1914 Truce, when German and British soldiers fraternized and played football in No Man's Land, to the gas attacks of the Battle of Loos in 1915. It shows Phillip Maddison surviving in the face of terror. While home in England on sick leavehe obtains his commission into a fashionable regiment, which has still not adapted to the sweeping changes of war, so that Phillip's social inadequacies make him the butt of his fellow officer's scorn. Yet alone among them Phillip has tasted the bleak reality of life, and death, on the Western Front. Although it should be much better known, it has attracted high praise most especially from George D. Painter (the biographer of Proust) and John Middleton Muury. the mystery - monster or divinity - at the centre. In my belief . . . the whole cycle will ultimately be recognized as the great historical novel of our time, its subject as the total experience of twentieth-century man.' George D. Painter novels of our time . . . It is amazingly rich in all the living detail of a swiftly changing society; the characters are drawn with such loving sympathy and such firmness of imaginative outline that we are entirely absorbed by their vicissitudes. We are apprehensive for them, we are relieved; we rejoice and are sorrowful; we are angry and we understand and we laugh and laugh again. To e able to do this with us is the novelist's supreme gift . . . I believe it is high time we awoke to the splendour and scope of his effort and achievement in A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Begin with the Dark Lantern and read on; you will be the richer for it.' John Middleton Murry

Author Bio

Henry Williamson (1895-1977) was a prolific writer best known for Tarka the Otter which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. He wrote much of else of quality including The Wet Flanders Plain, The Flax of Dream tetralogy and the fifteen volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight all of which are being reissued in Faber Finds. His politics were unfortunate, naively and misguidedly right-wing. In truth, he was a Romantic. The critic George Painter famously said of him, 'He stands at the end of the line of Blake, Shelley and Jefferies: he is last classic and the last romantic.'