Author:Richard Guilliatt,Peter Hohnen
In the years 1916-1918, the Wolf, an ordinary freighter fitted-out with a hidden arsenal of weapons, was sent by Germany on one of the most daring clandestine naval missions of modern times. Under the command of Kapitan Karl Nerger, the ship undertook a continuous fifteen-month cruise in which she traversed three of the world's major oceans, destroyed more than thirty Allied vessels and captured over 400 men, women and children. During this time the Wolf maintained radio silence and never pulled into port, surviving on fuel and food plundered from captured ships. Equipped with the era's newest technological marvels the Wolf was an instrument of terror in a new age of mechanised warfare.
In The Wolf, Richard Guilliatt & Peter Hohnen bring this little-known story to life by drawing on dozens of eyewitness accounts, unpublished memoirs, declassified government files, newspaper reports and family archives unearthed during three years of intensive research in several countries. What emerges from these accounts is a richly-detailed picture of the world through which the Wolf moved, with all its social divisions and naked xenophobia, its spirit of bravery and stoicism, its paradoxical combination of old-world social mores and rapid technological change.
This extraordinary adventure story exhibits the tremendous impact that one lone, audacious German warship made on the people of many nations during the final two years of the First World War.
An astonishing record...There is no other wartime diary that can match the scope of these diaries, that can demonstrate the range of command within a British regiment, or that touches on so many of the key engagements of the British Army during the Second World War. Quite simply, there is nothing like it, and the opportunity to publish a complete narrative of the war, such as these diaries represent, will almost certainly never arise again.
—— James HollandThe Sherwood Rangers was one of the outstanding armoured regiments of the Second World War and Stanley Christopherson's diary, taking us through the desert war and the whole of Northwest Europe from Normandy to the end is a rare and valuable account.
—— Antony BeevorThere are many published diaries of British army officers in the Second World War, but Stanley Christopherson's is one of the best I have read. He gives a detailed picture of life as a tank officer in the Desert and Normandy, and pulls no punches. This is an outstanding contribution to the literature of the Second World War.
—— Professor Gary SheffieldBrilliant. A really important source for the study of British war-making during the Second World War. It is also a tremendously observant account from the perspective of a brave and resolute army officer.
—— Professor Jeremy BlackThe book evocatively portrays the deprivations of wartime Berlin and the devastating emotional impact of one evil individual
—— Irish TimesAn uncompromising story of violence and beauty, searing trauma and a dreamlike circulation between the past and the present… This marvellous memoir is his poetic message, floating gently towards us
—— Joanna Bourke , Sunday TelegraphVivid… The war on the ground and the conflict in the head are combined in a work of art
—— Iain Finlayson , The TimesThe most haunting book I read this year
—— Lia Mills , Irish TimesMy Life as a Foreign Country is brilliant and beautiful. It surely ranks with the best war memoirs I've ever encountered - a humane, heartbreaking, and expertly crafted work of literature.
—— Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They CarriedContemporary wars are built on the distortion of language, the awful acronyms and euphemisms meant to screen us from the real. But in Brian Turner's extraordinarily capable hands, language is war's undoing, in the sense that these words won't allow absurdity and terror to be anything less than real.
—— Mark DotyBrian Turner has given us not so much a memoir as a mediation, rendered with grace and wit and wisdom. If you want to know what modern soldiers see when they look at their world, read this book.
—— Larry Heinemann, author of Paco's Story, recipient of the National Book Award.I love about My Life as A Foreign Country is its weird laugh-out-loud mood, and its in-the-thick-of-it hyper-sensual ability to capture beauty in the midst of terror. In these pages, home-spun truths sit alongside quotes from Marcus Aurelius, Walt Whitman and The Bhagavad Gita. My Life... is the melted-down language of a dream despatch from a capacious-hearted warrior poet.
—— Daljit NagraA brilliant fever dream of war’s surreality, its lastingness, its place in families and in the fate of nations. Each sentence has been carefully measured, weighed with loss and vitality, the hard-earned language of a survivor who has seen the world destroyed and written it back to life. This is a profound and beautiful work of art.
—— Benjamin Busch, author of Dust to DustTurner’s voice is prophetic, an eerie calm in the midst of calamity - as precise as a bullet, as all-encompassing as the apocalypse. One question echoes through these pages - How does someone leave a war behind, and walk into the rest of their life? My Life as a Foreign Country holds a mirror up to what propels us, over and over, into those wars, and serves as a reminder that, in the end, war is simply about counting the dead. Achingly, disturbingly, shockingly beautiful, in the end.
—— Nick Flynn, author of The Reenactments and The Ticking Is the BombAs simultaneously delicate and hard-edged as his poetry.
—— Richard W Strachan , HeraldTurner’s eloquent rendering illuminates both the shared space and the painful divide between poet and soldier, mission and memory, war and peace.
—— Roxanna Robinson , Washington PostThe marriage of [Aubrey’s] words and Scurr’s is so smoothly achieved that I have no idea where one leaves off and the other intervenes
—— Allan Massie , ScotsmanScurr’s imaginative feat of retrieval has produced a perfect book for dipping into when you want a taste of what it was like to be alive in the 17th century
—— John Carey , Sunday TimesIt is a testament to [Scurr’s] skill that you quickly stop thinking about technique and instead slip happily into the company of the character she has created. The wealth of research and the seams between imagination and reality disappear from view. This is truly selfless biography
—— Daisy Hay, 5 stars , Daily TelegraphA game-changer in the world of biography
—— Mary Beard , GuardianA delightful read about the ebb and flow of thoughts in one extraordinary man’s mind
—— Claire Harman , Evening StandardDrawing on [Aubrey’s] manuscripts and letters, [Ruth Scurr] has fashioned, as chronologically as possible, an autobiography in the form of the diary that Aubrey never wrote. It fits him perfectly… Ms Scurr has done him proud
—— The EconomistAubrey was a delightful, self-deprecating man ... A conventional biography of Aubrey could easily have become a portrait of the time through which he had lived, allowing the man himself to be overshadowed ... Instead, Ruth Scurr has invented the diary Aubrey might have written, incorporating his own chaotic, sometimes scrappy literary remains to form a continuous narrative. ... lucky him to have been accorded a biography as whimsical as his own self
—— Clive Aslet , Country LifeScurr’s book illuminates and poignantly captures the voice of a man more often a “ghostly record keeper” in his own writing
—— Carl Wilkinson , Financial TimesJohn Aubrey brilliantly reconfigures the art of biography
—— David Abulafia , Times Higher EducationBold and imaginative recreation of the diary of the 17th-century antiquary. It shows how close a scrupulous and unselfregarding biographer can come to the savour of a life
—— Graham Robb , SpectatorA genuinely remarkable work of biographical innovation.
—— Stuart Kelly , TLS, Books of the YearI’d like to reread Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey every Christmas for at least the next five years: I love being between its humane pages, which celebrate both scholarly companionship and deep feeling for the past
—— Alexandra Harris , GuardianRuth Scurr’s innovative take on biography has an immediacy that brings the 17th century alive
—— Penelope Lively , GuardianAnyone who has not read Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey can have a splendid time reading it this summer. Scurr has invented an autobiography the great biographer never wrote, using his notes, letters, observations – and the result is gripping
—— AS Byatt , GuardianA triumph, capturing the landscape and the history of the time, and Aubrey’s cadence.
—— Daily TelegraphA brilliantly readable portrait in diary form. Idiosyncratic, playful and intensely curious, it is the life story Aubrey himself might have written.
—— Jane Shilling , Daily MailScurr knows her subject inside out.
—— Simon Shaw , Mail on SundayThe diligent Scurr has evidence to support everything… Learning about him is to learn more about his world than his modest personality, but Scurr helps us feel his pain at the iconoclasm and destruction wrought by the Puritans without resorting to overwrought language.
—— Nicholas Lezard , GuardianAcclaimed and ingeniously conceived semi-fictionalised autobiography… Scurr’s greatest achievement is to bring both Aubrey and his world alive in detail that feels simultaneously otherworldly and a mirror of our own age… It’s hard to think of a biographical work in recent years that has been so bold and so wholly successful.
—— Alexander Larman , Observer