Maurice Baring

Reproduction of the original: An Outline of Russian Literature by Maurice Baring

It was into the famous Baring family of merchant bankers that Maurice Baring was born in 1874, the seventh of eight children. A man of immense subtlety and style, Baring absorbed every drop of culture his fortunate background gave him; in combination with his many natural talents and prolific writing this assured him a place in literary history.

Anthony Kay, a blind man, meets a gathering of people and quickly becomes involved in their lives. One of them is novelist James Rudd, who decides to study and write about the characters around him. The story he ends up with is very different to the one Kay would have told .... Maurice Baring skillfully blends the objective and subjective.

Basil Wake and his wife Hyacinth exist in the social whirl of London’s early 1900s. For years Hyacinth has conducted a discreet affair with Parliamentarian Michael Choyce, who seems to fit into the Wakes’ lives so conveniently. But a startling portrait of the mysterious and beautiful Daphne Adeane signifies a change in this comfortable set-up.

Maurice Baring made an unlikely soldier but during the First World War, at the age of forty, he obtained a commission and became Private Secretary to Hugh Trenchard, Commander of the Royal Flying Corps in France, and, later on, creator of the Royal Air Force. Drawn from letters and diaries, Baring describes the momentous war years that forged the flying services. The embryo RAF was lucky to have such an observant and eloquent chronicler of its early years. General Foch said 'There never was a Staff Officer in any country, in any century like Major Maurice Baring'. When first published in 1920, it was hailed 'as one of the few war books that will survive'.

"Poems, 1914-1919" by Maurice Baring Maurice Baring was an English man of letters, known as a dramatist, poet, novelist, translator, and essayist, and also as a travel writer and war correspondent. Though he had an extensive writing career, this book focuses on the poems he penned over the course of a few years. The volume contains: In Memoriam A.H., Diffugere Nives, Julian Grenfell, Pierre, Icarus, Epitaph, August, Vita Nuova, Italy, Seville, Greece, Russia, A June Night in Russia, Harvest in Russia, Dostoyevsky, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Shelley, Phèdre, The Wounded, Elegy on the Death of Juliet's Owl, and Le Prince Errant.