British Diaries

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.

The diary of David Watson, who rose through the officer ranks to command one of the four divisions in the Great War, is an exceptional document that details with candid insight the responsibilities of senior command and shows the talent required to rise through the CEF to divisional command. The only published diary of a Canadian who held this rank in the last two (critical) years of the war, it focuses on the evolution of military leadership and associated challenges that Watson (and his peers) faced during the Great War. It recounts how he navigated not only the military battlefield in France and Belgium but also the political battlefield of the Canadian Expeditionary Force and larger British Expeditionary Force. The divisional commanders played a central role in the Corps’ transformation into a first-rate professional army, a transformation that coincided with Watson’s tenure at the 4th Division. Major-General David Watson’s personal accounts offer valuable insights into the innermost workings of the Canadian Corps at various stages during the war and in particular its emergence as an elite fighting force and the pride of a nation

What is it like to run away from bombing, lose your family, and work out how to take care of yourself in a foreign country when you are seven years old? What do you do when the woman who promised you a good job in Europe turns out to have sold you into prostitution? How do you escape from torture and detention in Libya? What is it like to almost drown in the Mediterranean and then be confined in a garbage and rat-filled settlement on a Greek island for years? In this book, Lynne Jones answers these questions by combining direct testimony from children with a blazingly frank eyewitness account of providing mental health support on the front line of the migrant crisis across Europe and Central America in the past five years. Her diaries document how a compassionate welcome shifted to indifference and hostility toward those seeking refuge from war, disaster, and poverty in the richest countries in the world. They shine light on what it is like to be caught up on the front lines of the migrant crises in Europe and Central America, either as a person in flight or as a volunteer trying to help. They show how people who have fled war, poverty, and disaster—trapped in degrading, humiliating living conditions—have responded with resourcefulness and creativity. In the absence of most large professional humanitarian agencies, migrants and volunteers together have created a new form of humanitarianism that challenges old ways of working. Today there are 79 million forcibly displaced people in the world today, 1 percent of the world’s population. Understanding the perspectives of people on the move has never been more important. The Author's profits from this book will be donated to the charity: CHOOSE LOVE/HELP REFUGEES

“An officer’s diary hidden away for 40 years reveals the horrors of World War One in harrowing detail.” —The Sun Some Desperate Glory charts the progress of an enthusiastic and patriotic young officer who marched into battle with Palgrave’s Golden Treasury—a collection of English poems—in his pack. Intensely honest and revealing, his diary evokes the day-to-day minutiae of trench warfare: its constant dangers and mind-numbing routine interspersed with lyrical and sometimes comic interludes. Vividly capturing the spirit of the officers and men at the front, the diary grows in horror and disillusionment as Vaughan’s company is drawn into the carnage of Passchendaele from which, of his original happy little band of 90 men, only 15 survived. “This diary of a few months in the life of a young officer on the Western Front in 1917 deserves to rank close behind Graves, Owen, Sassoon, among the most brilliant and harrowing documents of that devastating period.” —Max Hastings, author of Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 “This stark WW I diary by a 19-year-old subaltern in the British army begins with an account of his eager departure for the western front, and ends eight months later with an awesome description of the battle of Ypres in which most of his company died.” —Publishers Weekly

This treasury gathers together excerpts from diaries across the generations to paint a rich and surprising picture of a landscapeand a way of life we think we know so well.

The long awaited and highly revealing diaries of the politician, diplomat, and socialite (married to Lady Diana Cooper) 'This is a fabulous, jaw-dropping read' SUNDAY TIMES 'Duff Cooper was as close to the action as anyone during the dramatic events of the mid-20th century. He was also comically priapic, committing enough sexual indiscretions to fill a dozen diaries' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Fascinating for two things: their testament to an exhilarating century and their witness to a vanished age of power and privilege ... What a man' OBSERVER Duff Cooper was a first-rate witness of just about every significant event from 1914 to 1950. His diary includes some magnificent set pieces - as a young soldier at the end of WWI, as a politician during the General Strike of 1926, as King Edward VIII's friend at the time of the Abdication, and from Paris after the liberation in 1944, when he became British ambassador. If Duff Cooper's name has dimmed in the 50 years since his death, publication of these diaries will bring him to the fore once again. His family have long resisted publication - indeed Duff Cooper's nephew, the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis, was so shocked by the sexual revelations that he suggested to John Julius Norwich that it might be best for all concerned if they were burnt. Now, superbly edited by John Julius Norwich, who familial link ensures all kinds of additional information as footnotes, these diaries join the ranks.