From Emmanuel to the Somme

The First World War still provokes controversy. History cannot seem to choose between the vision of the patrician poets and the perspective of the ordinary soldiers.

Somewhere between the two is the voice of Albert Ernest Tomlinson. A northern English grammar-school boy who studied modern languages at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he combined an awareness of social realism with an educated literary sensibility. It was war that quickened his artistic talent, and this compilation of his best work displays the remarkable range of Tomlinson's writings.