A Moment of War (Penguin Modern Classics)

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And yet there is an evanescent, very knowing sensibility at work as well, especially exposed in the murky, fluid issue of sexuality. I don't really care if the book is all truthful or not – the episodes with the 16 year old girl Eulalia certainly seem like the fantasies of an old man and I'm sure he wasn't so often almost killed as he states, but the Spanish civil war was over 50 years old by the time Lee was writing about it and no-one's memory stands up to that much time, no matter how memorable the incidents. A very nice set of the first impressions of this classic trilogy, the second and third titles signed by the author, Cider in unusually nice condition.

A Moment of War (1991) by the British author Laurie Lee is the last book of his semi-autobiographical trilogy. His other works include The Voyage of Magellan (1948), A Rose for Winter (1955), The Firstborn (1964), I Can't Stay Long (1975) and Two Women (1983). For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time.A Moment of War is the third and final book in Laurie Lee’s autobiographical account of his childhood and youth. When he knocks at the door of the hut he has reached, he's met with some suspicion, apparently insofar as he's carrying a violin and books (incidentally, he never, never, plays the violin during the time he spends in Spain, nor does he ever reads any of the books he was carrying around). He has come to join the International Brigade, to fight fascism and to support the Republican cause. The preceding books of the trilogy are Cider With Rosie (1959) and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969).

The effect of military discipline is to suppress individuality, but in the preposterously unmilitary International Brigade, the collection of volunteers who flooded into Spain to fight in the Republican cause, individuality was never suppressed. You could pick out the British by their nervous jerking heads, native air of suspicion, and constant stream of self-effacing jokes.I regard the Orwell as a better book; yet the Lee is beautifully written and is true in spirit even if the facts are perhaps dubious. A Moment of War" is the magnificent conclusion to Laurie Lee's autobiographical trilogy begun in "Cider with Rosie" and "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning". On inspection of his passport, it is revealed that he spent time in the South and in Morocco, the birthplace of Franco’s coup attempt at the time the plotting was taking place.

An autobiographical trilogy, containing details of a young man's journey, his idyllic childhood in rural England and "a poetic memoir" of the Spanish Civil War. This sombre book was starkly different to the heat, colour and gaiety described in 'As I walked out one Midsummer Morning'. Even if the horrors of war is described with much less details than many others have given, there were times when I was a bit relieved that it was such a short book. Detachment is the dominant note and is carried throughout the book despite or because of mid-winter crossing of the Pyrennes, abrupt arrests and imprisonments, absurd experiences in camps, air raids and artillery shelling, and one intense experience on the front line - around twenty pages from the end of the book - that two an oddity a memoir of war in which the main business of war always seems to be taking place away from the fighting, in that way it is distinct from Homage to Catalonia, indeed because of that statement of detachment Lee's book put me in mind of Goodbye to Berlin.

This is one of those times when I am reviewing based entirely on my response to the subject matter - and has nothing to do with the quality of the writing. If Franco captures Teruel, he will divide the Republicans to the north and south; as Lee explains, the loss of this fortified city in the mountains is the beginning of the retreat for the Republican army.