Good Old Somersets

This is a day-by-day chronicle of the Somerset Light Infantry Battalion from August to December 1914, using the official War Diaries together with extracts from personal diaries and correspondence. It covers fighting, movements, trench life and the relaxation of a typical group of regular soldiers who came to be known as 'The Old Contemptibles'.

All these records and recollections, quaint and curious as they might now seem to us, present a fascinating collage of good old times in Somerset in the not so long ago.

This compilation contains three complete novels and eight major short stories from the canon of one of the twentieth century’s most enduringly popular fiction writers. From London to Hong Kong, from Paris to Pago Pago, in Samoa or Malaya or on a Tahitian tropical isle, the men and women in this collection of masterfully crafted tales inhabit exotic, mysterious worlds—and at their own peril invade the dark territory of the human heart. Somerset Maugham, a noted English novelist, playwright, and author of masterly short stories, spent several months in the Pacific in 1916 and 1917 during an interlude in his service in British intelligence during World War I. Several of his works have been made into movies and plays, including Razor’s Edge, Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, Rain, and The Moon and Sixpence. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

In 1987, the original Oxford Publishing Company produced an amalgam of two paperback books written by former Branksome fireman Peter Smith. Mendips Engineman and Footplate over the Mendips told the story of a young railway fireman and his driver Donald Beale. Enthralling the reader with stories of working trains over the old Somerset & Dorset line, the two books encompassed not just ordinary workings, but also early footplate experiences of Peter's own railway career, driving the very last northbound 'Pines Express' in 1962. This edition contains the complete original text and also includes a new set of black and white images with which to illustrate what remains a still lamented cross-country railway. The Somerset and Dorset: From the Footplate is a book to be savored, not just by those who remember this line, but by a whole generation of railway enthusiasts.

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