Love and War in the Apennines

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Hailed as Newby's 'masterpiece', `Love and War in the Apennines' is the gripping real-life story of Newby's imprisonment and escape from an Italian prison camp during World War II.

Love and War in the Apennines | Stanfords Love and War in the Apennines | Stanfords

Slight shelfwear and light spotting to fore-edge otherwise very good in slightly edge-nicked, unclipped, dust jacket. Quiet" turned out to be something of an understatement; I didn't pass another soul in three days of trudging along the (generally) well-marked paths. Taken to the mainland, he recounts the rather comical attempts of the Italian guards to deal with their prisoners. After the war, he worked in the fashion business and book publishing but always travelled on a grand scale, sometimes as the Travel Editor for the Observer. It was Wanda's father and his family and resistance contacts who helped Eric hide, a compelling story in itself, but he fell in love with Wanda and eventually had a happily-ever-after that lasted many decades.

Coming from a pre-war world where feelings were covered by laughter, he articulates jokes that disguise distress. More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon.

Love and War in the Apennines - Newby, Eric: 9780007367894 Love and War in the Apennines - Newby, Eric: 9780007367894

After the Italian government’s surrender to the Allies in September 1943, when their Italian captors fled and the Germans were yet to arrive, the British prisoners-of-war in the orfanotrofio escaped. Large men whom I remembered as small boys came forward and pumped my hand, enveloping it in their great fists. Newby was captured after an abortive attempt to play a rather amateurish 'special forces' role and blow up German bombers on a coastal airfield in Italy. The chemistry and sincere love that he shares with the Italian girl who initially helps him in translation adds quite a spark to the whole theme. After the Italian Armistice of 1943, Eric Newby escaped from the prison camp in which he'd been held for a year.He and his colleagues fail to make their rendezvous with a British submarine and are picked up by a fishing boat. Not wanting Wanda to get into trouble, Eric presents himself to the German soldiers, allowing Wanda to remain hidden. Newby’s reserve and good humour, the period English tic that runs through the book of making light of disaster, cover a breaking of the human spirit that altered the rest of his life. A large portion of the novel is spent describing Italy in a travel-writing fashion, and the characters he meets.

Love and War in the Apennines | Issue 62 Eric Newby | Love and War in the Apennines | Issue 62

He was, of necessity, homeless, a beggar, a captive of the frozen mountainous landscape, a vagrant dependent on the goodwill of the local Italian farmers who themselves faced possible execution if they helped a captive on the run. orange cloth, spine lettered and decorated in gilt, publisher's device in blind at centre of upper board; ribbon marker; book label of David Levine, Sydney, on upper pastedown; Slightly Foxed, London, 2019. At one point, he was obliged to walk across a possible minefield, which he describes as ‘a disagreeable sensation’. In evoking his memories of the war, writing 25 years after it had ended, Newby was also evoking his knowledge or recollection at the time of the world he had left behind at home, an era of ‘volunteer ladies dishing out fish and chips to [soldiers], and great squelchy jam sandwiches, and cups of orange-colored tea’. People know little of the world outside: for the women at the farm of stones, England is famous only for its monstrous criminals like Dr Crippen and Jack the Ripper, and the legendary London fog.What upset me more than anything, quite irrationally, was the thought that if we drowned – which seemed more than probable – none of our people would ever know what had happened to us and why. George Eric Newby CBE MC (December 6, 1919 – October 20, 2006) was an English author of travel literature.