Past and Present

Description: 'Past and Present' by Edward Greenwood is a compulsively written and utterly readable account of the life of a teacher and writer who is now in his ninth decade. The very first person who read the book told Edward it was so intriguing he could not put it down and the founder and head of The Conrad Press, which is now publishing the book, had the same experience when he read it.

As Edward says: 'I have nine decades to look back on and throughout almost all that time I've been passionately interested in people and in history and in literature and in many other things. I think I have a story to tell.'

'Past and Present' is indeed a riveting read, full of a delight and appreciation of life and written so vividly that you really do feel Edward is immersing you in all his life's experiences. He describes his remarkable family, his beautiful mother, his admired brother Bobby who was a flier killed in the Second World War, and his gifted elder sister Edith who knew German and visited Germany in the fraught year 1933 when Hitler took power.

Edward also writes about his boarding school education, his life at Oxford University and his work as a factory inspector and library cataloguer at the University of Keele. He also writes about his long marriage to his beloved wife Barbara with great vividness and great emotion, which he also brings to the suicide of his younger son Edward and his, Edward's, experience of falling in love with a beautiful young Romanian woman when he was in his eighties and then slowly having to face the unpleasant reality that he had been the victim of a honey trap.