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This authorised biography of the poet Kathleen Raine tells the story of how she developed from a small girl, who knew at the age of eight that she wanted only to write poetry, into a world-renowned poet and literary scholar. Philippa Bernard follows Kathleen Raine’s struggle against the constrictions of her suburban childhood to her exciting days at Girton College in the twenties, where she became friends with many brilliant writers, artists and scientists, including William Empson, Julian Trevelyan, Jakob Bronowski and the film maker Humphrey Jennings, friendships which lasted all her life. After a short marriage to Hugh Sykes Davies, she eloped with the poet Charles Madge to live in Blackheath where two children were born. An affair led to a break with Charles, who was involved at the time with Inez Spender, wife of the poet Stephen, and at the outbreak of war in 1939, she ran away with her children to the Lake District to the home of Michael Roberts and his wife Janet Adam Smith. Taking a cottage near Ullswater, she found a peaceful seclusion which enabled her to write some of her finest poetry, but found it difficult to support her family. Leaving the children with her friend, the art patron Helen Sutherland, she moved to London. In a room off the Tottenham Court Road, she came to know Sonia Brownell (later to marry George Orwell) who introduced her to the artists and writers of the Fitzrovia set, Dylan Thomas, Cyril Connolly and Rex Whistler among them, and including the strange figure of Tambi – James Tambimuttu – who published her first book of poems, Stone and Flower. Kathleen had already achieved much critical acclaim and published several volumes of poetry when she met through Tambi the naturalist and explorer Gavin Maxwell. She fell disastrously in love with him, but his homosexuality, which she understood from the beginning of their relationship, proved too much of an obstacle, for she totally failed to understand that this delightful companion, whose love of all natural things matched her own, completely failed to reciprocate the warmth of feeling that overwhelmed her. The title of his book, Ring of Bright Water, centred around his beloved otters at his home in Scotland, was taken from a poem of hers. An intensive period of research on the poet William Blake led to the publication of Blake and Tradition, marking Kathleen out as a leading Blake scholar. This was followed by works on Coleridge, Yeats and Thomas Taylor. Towards the end of her long life Kathleen Raine founded the journal Temenos with the help of Prince Charles, who became a good friend. She travelled to India, was honoured with the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and made a Companion of Honour. Philippa Bernard met her as a neighbour in Chelsea where she and her husband owned an antiquarian bookshop. In this book she assesses sympathetically the work of Kathleen Raine, but does not hesitate to throw a critical light on this unusual woman of the highest intellect who loved her children deeply but deserted them to follow her instincts, who had an entirely practical attitude to the world about her, but who pursued a spiritual path, and who achieved so much in the world of literature and poetry.

This Life of Grace is a biography and a history. It tells the story of Grace Jarrold, the youngest of eight children, who lived for almost ninety years in the village of Plympton in Devon. It also tells the story of the village over the last century, beginning with the Great War of 1914-1918, school life at that time as revealed in original documents, the building of ‘homes fit for heroes’ in the 1920s, and the General Strike of 1926. It describes the dwindling of the old ‘upstairs-downstairs’ life, the approach of the Second World War and the Blitz of Plymouth. After the tranquil period of fifteen years that followed the War, things changed at great speed. The influence of farming declined, leading to the closure of Plympton Market in 2002. The village grew to ten times its size at the time of Grace’s birth and it was absorbed into the City of Plymouth. All the events are recorded as they affected local people. Grace is at the heart of the story, much of it told in her words, related remarkably to the author in frank conversations as she relived her life when it was drawing to its close, during almost three years in a hospital bed. The life of her husband, Major William John Symons, of the Indian Army, is told by the same author in Stranger on the Shore, published in 2009. In a pre-publication review, Peter Smith of Crane Books, writes, ‘I liked This Life of Grace even more than Stranger, which I had found engrossing and very moving. This Life of Grace is written with such warmth and deep affection and understanding, bringing the characters vividly to life. Grace was a person of dignity and humility, an unusual combination, to which I felt a sense of eloquence, wit and humour should be added. She was very much a Grace.’

As a British Army Officer in the Corps of Royal Engineers Toby Woodbridge twice deployed to Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, and spent a total of eight months in the notorious District of Sangin. Employed as mentor to the Afghan National Police during his last tour in the town Woodbridge spent over six months living, working and fighting alongside members of that much maligned but critically important organisation, gaining a privileged view of their work and insight into their world. His experiences from those two tours provide the background for this unique perspective on the difficulties and dangers involved when working, living and surviving on the front line of Afghanistan’s insurgency.

From being chased along a beach by a pack of wolves in Mombasa to being told to get lost by film star Jack Palance, Bernie Howard’s mates loved hearing his stories about his time in the Navy so much that he decided to put them all in a book. Rum, Bum and Baccy is a collection of short stories about Bernie’s life as a sailor in the Royal and Merchant navies in the 1960s and 1970s, beginning with his training at HMS Ganges in Ipswich as a 15-year-old in 1962. “Nobody in my family or anyone I knew had been in the Navy, but for some reason I just always wanted to go to sea,” says Bernie, who ran the Cavendish Stores on Cavendish Road in Highams Park after he left the navy, from 1977 to 1983. “I wanted to travel, to see different parts of the world. It was the adventure of it, I suppose.” As a schoolboy in Swaffham in Norfolk, Bernie and his classmates would be visited by prospective employers from the likes of the fishing fleet and the Merchant Navy, but when someone from the Royal Navy came, he was sold. Bernie stayed in the Royal Navy until 1971, when he joined the Merchant Navy, working for Shell, and sailing on some of the biggest super tankers in the world. “The comradeship was great in the Royal Navy,” remembers Bernie, 67, who now lives in Peterborough, “but you lived in such tight conditions, there’d be 36 of us living in a very small room. In the Merchant Navy, you got your own cabin, you had your own toilet and shower, there were gymnasiums and television rooms on the ship – luxury compared to the Royal Navy! And the food was fantastic as well, some of the best food I’ve ever had.

Tracing the life of the author’s father, this passionate, vivid memoir follows him through his childhood in the west of England, his successful 25-year career in the Indian Army prior to the country’s independence in 1947, and his final years in Devonshire, where he raised a family while the symptoms of Huntington’s disease gradually set in. Born of a family of impoverished Cornish fishermen, he and his six sisters cared for their dying mother after losing their father at the start of the First World War, before Huntington’s reared itself in their lives and led to the early death of three of the siblings. An absorbing, tense story of an emerging family crisis, this is an inspiring narrative showing that, through courage and faith in the face of great adversity, peace can be found. William Symons was born in Newlyn in 1878. Following family tradition he became a fisherman and a member of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. In 1914, following some early action at sea in the First World War, he died at the age of 36 yrs, leaving a widow and seven children, a boy and six girls. Unknown to him, and to his family, he left another legacy. In his body he carried a faulty gene, which, if inherited, could lead to Huntington’s chorea, a disease that normally becomes apparent in middle age. William died before symptoms appeared but the disease, known at the time as St Vitus Dance, was to claim the lives of a number of his descendants. This book chronicles the life of his eldest child, and only son, William John, who was 12 years old at the time of his father’s death. There was a small naval pension and William earned what pennies he could in his spare time until he left school the following year aged 13 years and went to work, initially for Dick Bath, the coal merchant. Somehow the family managed to stay together even after the death of his mother, Florence Louisa, from tuberculosis in 1921. They attended St. Peter’s Church, where the vicar, Mr Phelps, knew the family well and gave them his support. In 1919 William (always known as ‘Jack’ in the family) signed on as a soldier in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry and thus started a lifetime career in the Army and, from 1922, a long period of service in India. Mr Phelps helped him to weigh everything up and arrive at the decision to make this move. And so the story unfolds’. Eventually, at the age of 70 years, chorea would claim his life, but it was a life that saw a lot of happiness. Not least the birth of his two sons. The elder of these, John Symons, is the writer of this book.