Friends of a Kind

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This book is a journey of discovery as Matthew Mills Stevenson, affectionately known as the Cycling Historian, investigates the people, the places and the poetry that define how we remember the First World War.

Stevenson's reading, begun by the fireplace in the darkness of a Swiss winter, hinted at the extraordinary network of friendship that connected so many of the writers of that time. Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves served in the same regiment. Wilfred Owen spent time with Sassoon recuperating in Craiglockhart, a Scottish hospital. Winston Churchill shared friendships with T. E. Lawrence, Sassoon, Thomas Hardy and Erskine Childers. John Buchan, author of Greenmantle, admired Lawrence. And a constant presence in their lives is Churchill's private secretary, Edward Marsh.

When spring came Stevenson decided that these men would only come alive for him if he visited the places where they had lived or fought in the war. So, with his faithful folding Brompton bicycle, he set off to unlock a literary puzzle.