Robert Graves, aged nineteen, left school within a week of the outbreak of World War I, and immediately volunteered with the Royal Welch Fusiliers. His experiences as a junior officer form the heart of this compelling autobiography. Beginning with an ironic overview of his Edwardian childhood, he proceeds to a tongueincheek account of a young poets life at public school (not helpful to be halfGerman, but handy to take up boxing), progressing to caricatures of military stereotypes he encounters in training, and the devastating farce of the War itself, the blundering and mismanagement, and the appalling human consequences. Gravess handling of the horrors of war is always deadpan, honest and unadorned. It is wholly in line with his sense of the absurd that his commanding officer should write to inform his parents that he had died of wounds during the battle of the Somme. He soon found that patriotism was meaningless to the men in the trenches loyalty to comrades alive and dead drove him back to active service though still suffering from shellshock. Goodbye to All That takes Graves through his convalescence in England, his efforts to protect the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a friend and fellow officer, from the consequences of his public denunciation of the war marriage to artist and feminist Nancy Nicholson, postwar undergraduate years at Oxford and a decade as a struggling writer with four young children, beset with money problems and neurasthenia. It is written in a spirit of...

Binding: Hardback;408 pages; Publisher: TBS-Penguin Random House Wholesale; Classification: BGLA; Weight: 620 g; Dimensions: 137 x 259 x 27

Something not quite right? You have 21 days from the day you receive it, to send something back.

Please note, we cannot offer refunds on fashion face masks, cosmetics, pierced jewellery, adult toys, and swimwear or lingerie if the hygiene seal is not in place or has been broken.

Items of footwear and/or clothing must be unworn and unwashed with the original labels attached. Also, footwear must be tried on indoors. Items of homeware including bedlinen, mattresses, and toppers, and pillows must be unused and in their original unopened packaging. This does not affect your statutory rights.

Click here to view our full Returns Policy.